The Innovation Booster community, the cornerstone of Lagardère Travel Retail’s innovation strategy

PARIS, October 15th, 2018 – A year after its creation, the Lagardère Travel Retail Innovation Booster program has stepped up a gear – as 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 has always been committed to exceeding its partners’ expectations. When it comes to innovation, this statement becomes particularly accurate thanks to an entrepreneurial mindset deeply rooted in the Group culture.

Dag Rasmussen, Lagardère Travel Retail Chairman & CEO, comments “The travel retail industry and our customers' expectations are more than ever evolving at an accelerating pace. Hence there is a need to fast-track our time to market and be able to test new ideas quicker. By placing innovation as an enabler of our new strategic plan, the Executive Committee proves its commitment to answer this challenge”.

To underpin this ambition across its 34 countries, Lagardère Travel Retail has appointed a dedicated corporate team. Run by Romée Lamielle (Innovation Manager) and headed by Emmanuel de Place (COO Asia Pacific and Executive Committee sponsor of innovation for the Group), it has one objective: foster boldness and agility. One of the major initiatives to achieve this objective has been the inception of a global community dedicated to innovation - The Innovation Boosters.

Romée Lamielle says "Innovation Boosters are employees eager to drive and facilitate innovation within their entities. 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 organizations”.

"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 glocal positioning: they are addressing local challenges while being globally empowered and fostering cross-functionality and best practice sharing", Emmanuel de Place added.

Launched less than a year ago, this community is now 22-members strong and operates in more than 12 entities across Lagardère Travel Retail.

^{Pictured (from left to right, top to bottom): Yann Zhang (China), Stéphane Tissier (Duty Free), Eric Pichavant (Duty Free), Loic Adam (France), Caroline Maurs (Switzerland), Dejan Milosevic (Pacific), Jakub Bures (Czech Republic), Monica Kominami (Singapore), Romée Lamielle (Innovation Manager), Ondine Gaillochet (Travel Essentials), Clélia Hermouet (Duty Free), Jasmina Dordevicova (Czech Republic), Kremena Ivanova (Bulgaria), Paul-Arthur Lenoel (France), Jérémy Hamon (Innovation Officer), Antoine L’Hotelier (France). Not pictured: Michael Attali (Corporate), Ariane Bourges (Switzerland), and the US team (Alice Cheung, Mary Coons, George Fewster, David Gilbert, Nitin Lalwani, Chris Tennyson).}

Innovation Boosters focus on concrete initiatives, in accordance with the 3 pillars of the Group’s innovation strategy.

Further leverage our partners and the innovation ecosystem to surf on emerging trends and maximize our growth potential

• Monica Kominami is working 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 actively engaged in translating our partnership with the startup accelerator Lafayette Plug and Play into concrete business opportunities

Foster a culture of fast experimentation within the Group

• Each Booster starts his/her journey with a training program focusing on applying innovative methods to real case studies. In less than a year, more than 15 prototypes have been launched thanks to this program.
• Jakub Bures is launching a pre-ordering app for a selection of stores at Prague airport.

Build a global innovation community

• The Innovation Booster program is growing, with some countries replicating this initiative locally.
• Chris Tennyson launched and trained his own Innovation Booster team to further address pain points with innovative methods across Paradies Lagardère’s different businesses. 

"Supporting this community is the cornerstone of our 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. 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", said Dag Rasmussen.