Innovation starts with understanding our customers. By focusing on meaningful customer challenges, we can develop market-led solutions that create lasting value.
Our Growth Hub process provides a structured approach to making this happen: Discover, Test, Develop & Assess, and Execute & Scale. And with £500m of Growth Hub orders over the past five years, it is already delivering commercial impact.
But the Growth Hub is about more than a process. It’s about building a culture where curiosity is encouraged, ideas are shared openly, and diverse teams collaborate to challenge thinking, explore new possibilities, and turn customer insight into meaningful solutions.
Building this mindset into our everyday culture is key to unlocking its full potential. Through IMI Way Day, we took an important step towards doing just that.
30 days. Over 10,000 colleagues. More than 120 customer challenges. This year, colleagues across our global business came together to experience the Growth Hub mindset in action, working collaboratively to explore customer challenges and discover what we can achieve when we bring different perspectives together.
Embedding a shared mindset through experience
How do you move from explaining a process to embedding it in everyday work? By giving people the opportunity to experience it for themselves.
“Mindset doesn't change because someone explains it. It changes through experience.”
Liz Rose, Chief People Officer
That thinking was central to IMI Way Day. Rather than simply asking colleagues to watch a presentation or complete training, teams worked together on customer challenges, putting the Growth Hub mindset into practice.
Through this experience, colleagues explored how to start with customer needs, challenge their thinking, develop ideas and learn from one another. Just as importantly, they experienced the behaviours that underpin the Growth Hub culture: curiosity, openness, collaboration and a willingness to pivot and explore new possibilities.
With more than 10,000 colleagues taking part, IMI Way Day also created a shared experience across our global business. It helped connect people around a common understanding of not only how the Growth Hub works, but how we can work together to solve problems, learn from different perspectives, and create value for customers.
Stronger connections, better collaboration
One of the most important aspects of the Growth Hub culture is how it brings people together. Customer challenges rarely sit within the boundaries of a single function, and solving them benefits from a range of perspectives.
By bringing diverse perspectives together, we can challenge assumptions, build on each other’s ideas and develop a deeper understanding of customer challenges from different angles.
“Growth Hub has changed the way we work, we do not work in sequences, we truly cooperate and co-create as a team. Thanks to that we are stronger, more efficient, and aligned as one big team.”
Barbara Pawłowska, Global Head of Quality
IMI Way Day brought this principle to life, giving colleagues the opportunity to put collaboration into practice. Across our sites, teams came together to exchange experiences, share ideas, and learn from one another.
One day. A lasting opportunity.
IMI Way Day was a moment to bring the Growth Hub mindset to life, but embedding it into our culture is an ongoing journey.
The real impact will come from what we do on a daily basis: how we listen to customers, challenge assumptions, share knowledge, collaborate across functions, and turn insight into solutions. These everyday behaviours are what make the Growth Hub mindset part of how we work, not just a process we follow.
This mindset is also being introduced to our next generation of talent. As part of their induction, IMI graduates are tackling real customer challenges through the Growth Hub, working with subject matter experts and senior leaders to test assumptions, explore opportunities, and develop innovative solutions.
By building a culture where colleagues feel encouraged to ask questions, contribute ideas, and work together to solve meaningful customer challenges, we build high performing teams and create the conditions for innovation to thrive across IMI.
The Growth Hub gives us a shared framework for innovation. Our culture is what brings it to life, and our people are what will turn that mindset into lasting impact for our customers and our business.
Hear from our colleagues to learn more on how IMI Way Day brought the Growth Hub culture to life across our global business.
