Dodo pizza as one of Russian innovation companies

Do you know there is Syktyvkar city in Russia?
Or maybe you've heard of Fedor Ovchinnikov?

No and no. Then read along if you will.

Fedor says:

"In 2010 I left the book business and started to look for an idea for a new business that I could dedicate my life to, which will motivate me and encourage. I looked for a project that could grow multifold. I analyzed my pros and cons, my abilities, my interests and best traits and came to an idea of a business in a food industry. I decided to work in fast food. You can read about my choice in detail here.

I intentionally chose the existing mature market of pizza delivery. There is market and demand, we didn’t need to create it. How then one can succeed at this market? How can one build a global company where there are already transnational players with much larger resources? The idea is quite simple, that is: enter the existing market but operate more efficiently at the level of an individual store, create a more efficient model! I like to create systems, tune and perfect processes. I simply enjoy it. I didn’t know yet how this business works but I was sure that I can make it better.

So in the end of 2010 before I opened my first pizza restaurant I went to St. Petersburg and worked for a month as a regular employee in fast food restaurants, including Papa John’s. This is an American pizza chain, third in the world".

More from that blogpost here: http://sila-uma.ru/2015/01/22/the-dodo-way/.
And let's read a bit about how this business is being run...

Fedor says:

"How to make pizza prepared as quick as they change tires in Formula 1 pit stops?

We need to create speed and excitement environment in the kitchen which is not so simple. Complex systems of long-term motivation unfortunately don’t work here.

You can beg your employees, address their conscience and promise bonuses in the end of the month but that hardly works on a cold gray morning in the beginning of the week.

That’s where our Dodo IS information system comes into picture. It will create a system to turn the work in Dodo Pizza kitchens into global multi-user online game.

Outsiders usually say that IT in fast food is of minor significance or point out that there are plenty of out-of-the-box solutions, so there is no need to waste time and efforts to create our own system (we already invested over 1 million US $ into it and plan to invest 2 more million US $ in the next 2 years).

Well, we strongly believe that in order for IT solutions to make change these solutions…

1. should be deeply focused on one thing instead of being all-purpose solutions;

2. should deeply integrate into the production model, sometimes even change the model instead of being just an add-on;

3. and operate online in the cloud in the form of the web-application (SaaS — software as a service) instead of using operating systems and hardware.

These three key features are what makes Dodo IS different from all IT solutions by our competitors. Speed environment in the kitchen is a great case to show the advantages of our approach".

Full blogpost on this topic here: http://sila-uma.ru/2015/01/22/pizzamaker-60-level/