Product development and market launch of "Lucky Bunch"

WestLotto is Germany’s largest state lottery provider and a company owned by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Since 1955, WestLotto has been fulfilling its public mandate to organize lotteries in a secure, transparent, and responsible manner. The lottery proceeds benefit sports, welfare, arts, and culture, as well as nature conservation and monument preservation in North Rhine-Westphalia. 

With “Lucky Bunch,” WestLotto and UNITY have demonstrated how customer-centric innovation can also succeed in the regulated lottery market. In just 462 days, a market-ready product with an initial print run of one million copies was created from a thorough problem analysis and target group study based on trends, interviews, and statistical evaluations.

The development process followed a clearly structured innovation approach that UNITY set up together with WestLotto. This ranged from identifying the key needs of the target group (mature millennials, aged 35-45) to preparing and running an Innovation Boost Camp and consolidating and evaluating initial ideas. UNITY orchestrated the subsequent prototype development, accompanied user tests, and developed business cases with WestLotto with robust profit plans.  

Agile UNITY project management, innovation sprints, bottleneck-oriented innovation logic, and cross-functional collaboration reduced time-to-market by half. At the same time, methodological routines and a common understanding of innovation were established that will have an impact beyond the project. 

With UNITY’s support, a transferable blueprint was created that will bring future product ideas from initial concept to market entry more efficiently and quickly. The successful launch on September 25, 2025, in over 3,000 WestLotto shops in North Rhine-Westphalia marks the beginning of a new culture of innovation at WestLotto.