INTERNATIONAL. Lagardère Travel Retail says its ‘Innovation Booster’ programme now has 22 members and operates in more than 12 entities across the group. The programme launched less than a year ago.
Innovation Boosters is described by the company as a global community dedicated to innovation. Its objective is to “foster boldness and agility” through initiatives that are in accordance with the three pillars of the group’s innovation strategy.
Lagardère Travel Retail said the Innovation Booster programme would now be “stepped up a gear”. Assessing its impact over the first year, the company noted that “relationships with the innovation ecosystem have been strengthened and more and more projects are coming to life and starting to bring real results. The community is expanding throughout the world and integrating expertise from different fields, which reinforces the momentum of this initiative and fosters a real cultural change.”
Lagardère Travel Retail Chairman and CEO Dag Rasmussen said the company had set up a corporate team dedicated to innovation in response to “a need to fast-track our time to market and be able to test new ideas quicker”.
The team is run by Innovation Manager Romée Lamielle and headed by COO Asia Pacific and Executive Committee sponsor of innovation for the group Emmanuel de Place. The Innovation Boosters programme is a key focus of the corporate team.
“Innovation Boosters are employees eager to drive and facilitate innovation within their entities,” said Lamielle. “Their mission is to kick-start concrete business opportunities by promoting an innovative mindset and supporting the launch of new initiatives both at local and global level.
“My team’s role is to identify these Boosters, build and animate a community around them and most importantly train and empower them to become change agents within their organisations.”
de Place commented: “We created this community because we believe that innovation should be business-driven and trigger initiatives in line with our customer expectations. Therefore, our approach needs to be deeply rooted within our different entities to ensure we are tackling the right issues with the right people.
“In addition, this amazing team fully supports our global positioning: they are addressing local challenges while being globally empowered and fostering cross-functionality and best practice sharing.”
“The community is expanding throughout the world and integrating expertise from different fields, which reinforces the momentum of this initiative and fosters a real cultural change.”
Rasmussen said supporting this community was the “cornerstone” of the company’s innovation strategy. “We started this initiative with a test-and-learn approach, focusing on a few countries to ensure we brought value to our stakeholders,” he said.
“Given the results and the opportunities that have been unleashed, we are now ready to roll this out globally by the end of 2019, providing the grounds for our different entities to test innovative concepts and explore new horizons, every day.”
Each Innovation Booster participates in a training programme focusing on applying innovative methods to real case studies. More than 15 prototypes have so far been launched, including a pre-ordering app for a selection of stores at Václav Havel Airport Prague.
In another example of the programme at work, Lagardère Travel Retail is collaborating with a design thinking class at Singapore Management University on a 14-week project imagining the gift and souvenir shop of the future at Changi Airport.
Innovation Boosters are also actively engaged in “translating Lagardère Travel Retail’s partnership with start-up accelerator Lafayette Plug and Play into concrete business opportunities”, the company said.
