SkiStar is a 4.2 billion SEK (US$3.9b) Swedish company providing end-to-end solutions for Alpine tourism, including housing, retail and leisure. The company operates Scandinavia’s largest Alpine-mountain resorts in Sweden and Norway.

As the leading holiday organizer for Scandinavia, SkiStar aims to create memorable experiences with a focus on Alpine skiing in winter and active holidays in summer.

To continue to grow its business and be better equipped for the challenging future of increasing temperatures, SkiStar realized that it needed to evolve. With a focus on changing the perception of being a winter vacation spot to becoming an all-year global destination, SkiStar began exploring ways to increase and maintain customer engagement.

Additionally, to generate new revenue streams, SkiStar aimed to identify future business investments, accelerating growth through innovative, customer-centric service offerings. It looked to develop areas for future innovation that would make its strategy more tangible. SkiStar also wanted to activate its strategy through prototyping and testing product concepts that could shape and expand its future business.

So, how did EY Studio+ teams help SkiStar identify the most suitable business opportunities ahead? How did this collaboration support SkiStar to innovate in ways that reduced risk while getting buy-in from employees for future implementation?

EY Studio+ teams suggested that SkiStar adopt an experiment-led strategy to challenge the current ways of working and traditional processes of adding new services to the portfolio. This approach involved engaging leadership and employees right from the start to help ensure that all stakeholders were part of identifying the opportunities ahead and that everyone involved felt inspired and engaged in pursuing them.

EY Studio+ teams decided to take this approach because the most challenging part of any transformation success lies in its implementation. Engaging its people from the initial stages of transformation allowed SkiStar employees to co-create and become automatic implementers who felt ownership of the innovation. This is backed by data from EY showing that innovations can be over 70% more successful when putting people at the heart of transformation. This method is advantageous compared to the traditional approaches to strategy, which are typically understood by only the top 5% of the company, leading to frustration later in the project when the strategy fails in implementation. Similarly, recent EY research points to how frustration within the workforce can instead be optimized for better overall success, by reframing transformation as a dynamic process that requires continuous adaptation, to energize their program.

As part of the process, the EY Studio+ teams conducted three different co-creative workshops:

• The first workshop focused on strategy discussions with the senior leadership to understand the unused assets and potential opportunity areas the leadership team saw in the market. The outcome of this workshop was 10 key opportunity areas that acted as the base for further analysis and prioritization of “innovation arenas” used in the process going forward.

• The second workshop was a two-day session with the top 70 leaders of the company to prompt them to co-create new ideas. At the end of the workshop, they picked four opportunities:
  • Leverage their HR capabilities and use their extensive experience in recruitment to build new revenue streams. The company hires and trains 2,000 people within the hospitality sector annually and has the skills and processes needed to create a platform to make its expertise available to the public.
  • Expand the world of Valle, leveraging SkiStar’s kids’ winter activity icon to help parents get their children to engage in more physical activity year-round, no matter where they are.
  • Build a digital community around the outdoor experience and expand their target groups while creating a revenue model.
  • Become the first completely sustainable travel agency that caters to guests’ every need, from the moment they leave their homes and throughout the entire vacation.

Three of the four opportunities are currently being prototyped and conceptualized to strengthen viability and desirability.

• The third phase was a workshop involving all of the company’s 650 full-time employees. This session helped the employees understand the motivation and purpose of the strategy and made them feel included in the process. During the session, the employees were encouraged to partake in the development of new services. Through an ideation process, the management received more than 100 new potential ideas for future solutions.

“The team challenged us to work in new ways to think beyond our existing operations and made realizing the ideas seem both doable and fun. Having employees co-create strategy with leadership has opened avenues that could not be seen earlier. I cannot wait to start the next steps in scaling what we have developed so far,” said Stefan Sjöstrand, CEO, SkiStar.

This process is helping SkiStar accelerate its strategy implementation. For instance, in the Valle project, SkiStar has already signed up 30 families for testing various activities. The test group has engaged and given feedback in activities such as trying new, healthy recipes and de-littering initiatives to evaluate the new platform’s content.

So, the strategy is getting tested in parallel to its creation – leading to more rapid implementation and the realization of new revenue streams.

The experience at SkiStar demonstrates the viability of testing strategy in parallel to its development can work even in larger global companies. This approach also helps establish the importance of placing humans at the center of transformation to keep everyone engaged. There is a lot of excitement in the organization about rolling out the various offerings that came out of this strategy exercise. For example, the Valle app was already launched in early 2023. Another initiative, the recruitment platform and connected academy, is getting rolled out soon.

“Close collaboration and openness made it possible to create a lot of value in a really short time – I am excited to see what will come out of the collaboration going forward,” said Lisa Lindström, EY Studio+ Nordics Business Reinvention Leader.

SkiStar’s approach to building new businesses has several advantages over the traditional approach to strategy.

The execution is faster

The strategy has already been tested on the public, and the employees have already been involved from the initial stages so that they become automatic implementers. This is important because implementation is the most challenging part of any innovation. By putting employees at the center of co-creation,  they are on board right from the start. The speed comes from building and testing ideas in a two-week sprint instead of theorizing something grand for a big, expensive launch.

The opportunity gets validated before implementation

This approach of experimentation gives the team implementing the strategy a strong grasp of whether they are “onto something” before making a major investment. It reduces risk and provides the comfort of knowing that any investment is into a strategy that the organization can execute.

It is easier to get stakeholder buy-in

It is easier to get stakeholder buy-in because the board and other stakeholders will understand what the strategy is as they will see it in action.

There is a common belief among EY Studio+ teams that if an innovation feels too risky, it has probably gone wrong. This is because innovation is too important for a company to put its trust into something that is unlikely to succeed. Validating a strategy in parallel to its creation reduces risk and helps enable faster execution. In executing these programs, EY Studio+ teams bring empathy at various levels to help the transition and, most importantly, bring speed to the transition.