Creating extraordinary experiences for Westfield shoppers
THE CHALLENGE
Scentre Group owns and operates 40 shopping centres across Australia and New Zealand with over 11,000 retail outlets that see over 500 million shopper visits each year. As a well-known market-leader in traditional retail, Westfield knew they needed to make innovation business as usual to keep up with rapid changes in the retail environment, online shopping and consumer demand. Scentre’s CEO challenged all 2,500 people in Scentre Group to come up with innovative ideas to delight their customers.
“What’s one thing we can implement in all centres that our shoppers will consider to be extraordinary?”
Peter Allen, Scentre Group CEO
THE APPROACH
Rapidly developing ideas internally
Over 100 ideas were generated in response to the challenge. The Strategy Group met with Scentre Group’s Innovation Manager, Jo, to propose a radically different approach to developing internal ideas – running them like start-ups with seriously limited time, budget and resources. The Strategy Group designed a Venture Strategy program called Incubation Scentre, taking the three best ideas from conception through to market validation in just 6 weeks. Two of the start-ups experienced major pivots due to market lessons uncovered on the program and their solutions changed dramatically as a result.
THE OUTCOME
Successful ideas given the green light
At the end of the program, each of the start-ups presented their market-validated ideas and business models to the Scentre Group executive team.
The evidence generated through the program gave the executive team the confidence to approve all three start-ups through to the next phase. Three developed, prototyped and validated ventures were given the green light for implementation.
In a significantly shorter period of time than usual, significant potential value had been unlocked for the organisation.
“Working as a start-up has been a life changing experience. I think its really changed my perspective on so many things. When I think back to how I thought about innovation and what it took to be innovative, I just think this experience has opened my mind to a whole new world”
Justine Guest, Scentre Manager at Liverpool NSW
