Unleash innovation

Innovation is a significant part of our culture

We understand how volatile our sector is and we are committed to embrace innovative approaches in the way we conduct our business and in return create memorable experience for our partners. We welcome new ideas and exploit them to deliver effective processes, products, and ideas.
To ensure that we can continue to adapt to these evolving needs, we have strengthened our commitment to innovation by creating an approach led by a dedicated corporate team: “Unleash innovation”.

A clear direction

We believe innovation is about executing concrete initiatives creating value both for our company and our customers. Through this approach, we are thus pushing innovative solutions to improve the overall shopping experience and strengthen our operational efficiency.

A single ambition

We want to foster audacity and agility throughout the company for the benefit of our customers. This approach aims to empower our collaborators so that they dare to experience new horizons, every day.

A straight forward strategy

Our innovation strategy is dedicated to support the launch and the roll-out of relevant projects and to reduce their time to market. We are doing so through 3 pillars: team-up, open-up and speed-up.

Team up

Create a glocal community around innovation

The Innovation Booster community

We are supporting a global internal community dedicated to innovation. Innovation Boosters are colleagues within our countries and Business Lines who are trained and supported to unleash and facilitate innovation locally while sharing best practices at a global scale. With more than 20 members, this growing community is spread across the Group and ensures our innovation approach is efficiently addressing local business challenges while leveraging the Group capacities.

Open up

Connect to the innovation ecosystem to stay aware of the emerging trends and act on them

Open innovation partnerships

We develop partnerships across the group to increase our agility and strengthen our ability to collaborate with the innovation ecosystem. These collaborations are linked to three major objectives, focusing on the delivery of concrete and tangible results:

1. Expand collaboration with relevant start-ups to accelerate our innovative initiatives.
2. Closely monitor and act on the latest trends impacting our industry to maintain our positioning as partner of choice.
3. Deliver additional employee training to ensure our culture is more innovative than ever.

Speed up

Foster a culture of fast experimentation

Innovative methodologies

We are pushing new ways of working and innovative methodologies to empower our colleagues and give them the ability to quickly test their ideas, roll them out if they work and learn from them if they fail. These training programs and global initiatives are customer-centric and agile. They are being developed throughout the group with one ambition in mind: to reduce our time to market and to meet our partners’ expectations more quickly than ever.