To modernize its long-standing employee ideation program and engage more than 115,000 employees, partnered with Yumana to bring employee-driven innovation, best-practice sharing and intrapreneurship together in one simple, engaging portal.
Michelin has been a pioneer in employee-driven innovation since 1927, when it launched its “Progress Ideas” initiative, giving every employee the opportunity to suggest ideas and contribute to continuous improvement across the company. Historically, these ideas covered areas such as safety, quality, working conditions, cost efficiency, diversity and the environment.
As Michelin's innovation ambitions expanded, this long-standing approach was no longer enough to address the full range of the Group's needs. The challenge was not only to modernize the existing program, but also to make it part of a broader innovation environment capable of supporting other approaches, including breakthrough innovation and best-practice sharing.
Michelin also wanted to broaden participation by engaging more employees, particularly beyond its industrial sites and across North America.
To scale and structure its innovation ecosystem, Michelin brought several complementary initiatives together within a single environment designed to guide employees towards the pathway best suited to their idea.
Together with Yumana, Michelin structured its approach around three complementary programs. “Progress Ideas” reinvents the Group's long-standing continuous improvement program, enabling employees to submit ideas spontaneously or in response to dedicated challenges.
“Business Ideas” supports intrapreneurial projects and high-potential initiatives that can lead to new business opportunities.
“Share & Copy with Pride” focuses on identifying, sharing and replicating best practices to accelerate the adoption of proven solutions across the Group.
By bringing these three programs together in a single portal, Michelin provides employees with one clear gateway to innovation while ensuring that each initiative follows the process, evaluation framework and support model best suited to its purpose.
The platform has significantly broadened access to innovation and helped Michelin build a global community of contributors:
in Progress Ideas
through the overall program
adopted within the first three months
Born out of Michelin's intrapreneurship program, ResiCare is a Michelin Group brand that develops and markets a high-performance adhesive resin that is 100% non-toxic and bio-based, designed for industrial applications
These results reflect both the scale of employee engagement and Michelin's ability to make innovation happen across the full spectrum, from continuous improvement to the most transformative projects, while strengthening collaboration and cross-functional synergies across the organization.
"Employee-driven innovation has long been part of Michelin's DNA. Our challenge was to evolve a well-established program, built on decades of ideas and contributions, without losing the engagement of the communities already involved while making the experience more intuitive and appealing to a broader audience.
A migration of this scale is about much more than changing tools. You need to bring users with you and improve the experience so that people genuinely want to get involved again.
What convinced us about Yumana was its ability to combine ease of use with powerful features. Today, the platform enables us to bring several innovation programs together within one coherent framework while managing the overall initiative at a global level. The responsiveness of the Yumana team and the quality of the co-creation process were also instrumental in making the project a success."
Domitille Leonard
Employee Experience Manager
“Ideas in Michelin” Program
Michelin
The Yumana-powered platform gives Michelin a common foundation for delivering a seamless employee experience while preserving the specific requirements of each innovation program.
Access different innovation programsManage each program according to its own rulesTurn initiatives into impactTo support its global innovation strategy, Michelin relies on a number of key Yumana capabilities designed to combine ease of use, multi-program management and employee engagement.
Yumana enables Michelin to manage multiple innovation programs within a common framework, avoiding the need for separate tools while delivering a seamless user experience.
Each program has its own validation processes, evaluation criteria, decision-making bodies and management rules. This flexibility allows every workflow to reflect the specific objectives of the initiative it supports.
Designed for international deployment, the platform adapts to the different languages, regions and organizational structures within Michelin. This makes it easier for employees around the world to participate and share initiatives across geographies.
Employee interactions, contribution recognition, rewards and engagement mechanisms help sustain Michelin's innovation culture over time and encourage participation across all programs.
Custom dashboards provide a comprehensive view of activity across the different programs, enabling teams to manage performance from local operations through to global oversight. For greater flexibility, Yumana's API also enables Michelin to build dedicated dashboards in Power BI.
The success of the initiative relies as much on the ecosystem Michelin has built around the platform as on the technology itself:
Michelin relies on a network of more than 660 ambassadors across its regions, countries and sites. Acting as local innovation champions, they support employees, help drive local initiatives and bring Michelin’s innovation culture to life on the ground.
While the overall strategy is defined centrally, its success depends heavily on the involvement of regions and individual sites. Local communication, adaptation to specific contexts, community engagement and recognition mechanisms give local teams the autonomy they need to make the initiative their own and keep it active over time.
Executive sponsorship from Innovation teams, managers and governance bodies helps give the programs legitimacy and ensures that employee initiatives lead to concrete action. Operating several programs through a shared platform also requires a common vision of the employee experience, while ensuring that each program can continue to deliver against its own objectives.
Moving Michelin's long-standing Progress Ideas initiative to a new platform was a major part of the project. Maintaining continuity for users, migrating historical data and supporting change management all helped secure the transition and drive adoption of a more intuitive and seamless experience.
Beyond the initiatives that ultimately deliver measurable results, Michelin recognizes contributions at every stage through mechanisms that are often managed locally. Participation, knowledge sharing, collective engagement and the implementation of ideas can all be recognized, helping sustain innovation over the long term.
Michelin sees the platform as an enabler of a much broader innovation culture. Engagement also comes from managers, local communities, peer-to-peer interaction and face-to-face moments. Michelin is continuing to develop new local initiatives and touchpoints to make innovation an even more natural part of employees' everyday working lives.
Beyond deploying the platform itself, Michelin has created the conditions needed to make innovation a collective, accessible practice that is deeply embedded in the Group's culture.
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