- Accenture announced recently that it is acquiring Happen, a privately owned innovation firm that uses digital tools to help clients generate new ideas
Accenture recently announced it is acquiring Happen — which is a privately owned innovation firm that uses proprietary methods, frameworks, and digital tools to help clients generate new ideas, products, and services that drive business growth. The terms of the acquisition were undisclosed.
Based in London and with additional offices in Amsterdam and New Jersey, Happen has a team that has a wide range of innovation skills such as strategy, design, ideation, insight, and research. And since launching in 2007, Happen helped companies primarily across the consumer goods, food & beverage, retail, and life science industries.
Happen’s key skills include consumer insights where teams identify new opportunities and determine how an organization can commercialize them along with product and service innovation. And Happen has developed many technology frameworks, tools, and methods like StarMaker, F.I.R.E., Asset-Out, and Vision-Led to help organizations grow and transform, including technology that can track and measure consumer emotions at scale.
For example, Happen helped a healthcare company use insights gleaned from consumers to overhaul a strategy to market cough medicine. And the new positioning took the product to the number two spot in the U.K. with one pack sold every 10 seconds. And Happen also helped a leading grocery chain map how people move around its stores thus making small tweaks to the customer journey more than doubled revenue from breakfast cereals and increased snack purchases by 40%.
“Bringing data-driven intelligence to clients’ decision-making, Happen helps companies tailor innovative products, services, and experiences to create customer-centric businesses,” said Eric Schaeffer, a senior managing director at Accenture — who leads the Products Industry X.0 practice and Supply Chain & Operations consulting practice. “The acquisition further enhances the analytics, design and engineering capabilities we use to help clients deliver relevance at scale to a marketplace of millions of individuals.”
Happen’s employees are going to join the innovation practice within Accenture’s Products Industry X.0 business — which works with clients in using advanced digital technologies for reinventing their products, services, and business models to achieve higher efficiency and growth in operations across the enterprise, including design and engineering, manufacturing, supply chain management, logistics and customer support.
“Joining Accenture will enable us to scale our offerings and capabilities and deliver our services to an even greater range of clients. We’re excited to become part of one of the world’s truly great companies,” added Happen co-founder Mark Cowan.
Happen is Accenture’s latest in a series of acquisitions to expand its Industry X.0 product innovation capabilities. For example, Spanish big data and AI company Pragsis Bidoop was acquired last month. And Accenture acquired ?What If! in March 2019 — which is an innovation company that uses an experimentation-driven approach for helping clients incubate new products, services, business models and organizational cultures.
“The acquisition of Happen underscores our commitment to innovation. We continue to invest in the U.K. and Europe to grow our talent, creating new opportunities to work on transformative and disruptive projects and to help our clients apply the latest digital technologies to drive their product innovation and growth agendas,” explained Accenture managing director and head of its Products practice in the UK and Ireland Matt Prebble.
As a leading global professional services company, Accenture now has 492,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. And the company combines experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions.
