Our innovation process is about more than creating new products: it’s opening the door to transformational cultural change.
Growth Hub, IMI’s innovation engine, is a hands-down commercial success. Our internally incubated Growth Hub projects produced £23m of orders in 2021 and £52m of orders in 2022. What makes Growth Hub even more exciting for our future is the way the process is already sparking a profound change in mindset at IMI.
Growth Hub encourages an agile, decisive, entrepreneurial approach to solving industry-wide customer problems. Sprint teams move at pace and learn new ways of working, including killing projects early and pivoting fast when necessary to take advantage of newer, bigger opportunities.
The growth in ambition this engenders touches far more than the hundreds people who have been involved in Growth Hub to date. Through the power of the network, it impacts on all 10,000 of our people and is bringing about a remarkable cultural transformation.
Experiments not projects
Testing assumptions to confirm them or bust them fast is a skill that can be applied to almost any role. Likewise, the Growth Hub mantra of focusing on product-market fit sharpens our commercial sense across the board. It drives us closer to our customers, keeping us tuned-in and alert to their emerging challenges and needs. Rather than the sense that we are inside IMI, communicating outwards towards our customers, we’re reversing the flow and making communication more of an outside-in process, inviting customers to hackathons and co-creation sessions which yield dozens of new insights and ideas.
The rigour of the Growth Hub approach is key to its success. Getting into the habit of busting assumptions early on is one of the best things team members learn from being involved with Growth Hub. We all hold assumptions, and what assumption busting does is allow you to test out: ‘Is this a fact, or is this a story we’re telling ourselves to make a situation more in line with our expectations?’
Growth Hub is arming our people with new skills that will help us navigate uncertainty and it’s changing how customers perceive us and we perceive ourselves. It is securing our future as a driving force behind our Better World growth ambitions.
