Big ideas welcome: How RS is turning curiosity into Innovation

As Director of Innovation Strategy and Insight, Alison Hutchings is at the heart of innovation at RS. With a background in Product & Supplier Management and Content at local, regional and global levels, Alison’s tendency to think outside the box led to her current role. She’s behind our newly launched Innovation Process, a group-wide initiative that welcome big ideas from anyone in the business. We sit down with her to talk about everything from her own career learnings to the exciting journey of innovation we are on as business.

Our World: Welcome Alison! Please tell us a bit about you, and how your career so far has shaped the role you do now.

Tap into what comes naturally

I’d encourage anyone to draw on their own natural strengths. I’m innately curious. I always want to know why things are being done in the way that they are, so I’m always getting into the detail, which is both a blessing and a curse! A natural leap from curiosity is innovation. 

It’s something that’s always interested me, but a real turning point was when my manager encouraged me to join a Strategic Innovation Program at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. This experience formalized innovation as a practice for me, providing a system and framework to streamline and guide my curiosity and growth mindset.

Seek diverse perspectives

It’s vital to bring different perspectives in, whether that’s from inside or outside your organisation.  I met so many people from diverse backgrounds during my time at business school. We all shared a growth mindset and exchanged innovation ideas and experiences. I still keep in touch with them and we continue to share and think through ideas together. 

We used a diverse network and different perspectives to help us to design the RS Innovation Process, by taking learnings from leading business innovators like Amazon, and research from the Oxford Business School and coming up with what felt right for RS. The Innovation Process is now live for all employees to contribute to. It’s a place for colleagues from across the business to submit an innovative idea about any aspect of our business.

Trust your instinct – but back it up with data

In the past I’ve been guilty of using unclear KPIs and just following my intuition because it felt right, but you need to then prove it's the right thing to do materially in practice, as well as in theory! Setting objectives and KPIs up front is a key part of the design of the Innovation Process If it’s the right approach, the KPIs will say that louder and with more strength than a gut feeling will.

Our World: It's great to hear all about some of the takeaways from your career, and innovation has clearly been a thread running throughout. Thinking now about innovation for our business, please can you tell us more about the Innovation Process – what advice do you have for someone who’s not sure where to start?

Learn from the outside world

Great ideas can come from anywhere – and it may even be something you’ve seen in the wider world or another organisation – it just needs to be new to RS. Whatever field we work in, we can all learn from the outside world.

Leading companies innovate and change to meet the customer needs of tomorrow. Amazon is a great example of continually trying new things. Everyone knows them as an e-commerce platform that started out by disrupting the book industry and selling books online. But they continued to diversify and create new products and services. They learned that enterprise infrastructure and cloud storage was a problem that they faced into as a business. They created an internal task force, tackling the problem head on and creating a modular solution. It was so good that they turned it into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and they now sell AWS services to customers, including RS. That’s a great example of a company innovating so well internally that they managed to spin up a service out of it. That now makes up multiple billions of the company's revenue.

The key to innovation

My message to our people would be not to be afraid to submit an idea that we don’t take forward. Failure is critical at both a personal and business level. It’s vital to innovation as it provides opportunities to learn. Through our Innovation Process, we keep track of every idea, including those we’re not pursing at that moment. 

Over time, as more ideas come through, we'll identify themes and patterns that hint at bigger opportunities. And even if your idea isn’t quite right for the innovation process, we can help you route it to the right place.

The role of humans…

RS has a really strong innovation culture. Making every day better is part of the lifeblood of our organisation. The Innovation Process harnesses that and give people somewhere to channel their ideas. So we want our colleagues to bring ideas to us! The key is not to overthink it - we can help to bottom out the idea, perhaps we need to perform an experiment, perhaps we need to support them to do more research. An innovation coach will guide each colleague and help develop it further if it's a true innovation opportunity. The process gives a reliable, robust and tested framework to gather all of those amazing ideas and opportunities and bring them into one place.

…and machines

There's a lot of panic around artificial intelligence, but when you speak to people about the kind of tools that they want to use, they’re talking about things like Microsoft Co pilot for support in day-to-day tasks. AI has a role to play in coming up with new ideas, but humans aren’t competing with AI – they’re collaborating. Human creativity and brain power can be augmented and accelerated through partnership with AI. It’s like having your own personal assistant or someone to bounce ideas off.

Looking to the future

There has to be a balance between innovation and the need for immediate business results. We all have a responsibility to keep the lights on and to keep doing what we do and delighting customers today, but we need think about how we can continue that success in the future, which will ultimately involve doing things in new ways. I would love RS colleagues to participate in the Innovation Process so we can really benefit from the hive mind of our business. Everyone wants to deliver brilliantly, to make every day better. We just need to pull that all together into one place, and drive positive action. In five years’ time, I think we will absolutely have some ground-breaking innovations under our belt.