As Futurologist in the John Lewis Partnership, one of the functions I am accountable for is JLAB, the John Lewis Partnership retail tech accelerator programme. JLAB was the first experiment I was involved in when I joined the Partnership back in 2014. JLAB was created to provide accessibility to ideas, new business models and the added capability to attract and retain talent. 2018 will mark five years of JLAB, which is now run across John Lewis and Waitrose, and we have very exciting plans for 2018 which we will share more about soon.
Taking in to account how much we have learnt from JLAB I wanted to write a post to share the five things you should consider when launching an accelerator inside your business.
You must have purpose: When I joined the Partnership I was shown a video of our founder, John Spedan Lewis, talking about experimentation. As an avid gardener he used the analogy of planting seeds and seeing if they would grow to articulate the importance of planting ideas and seeing how they would develop. He said that the Partnership was an experiment in this way. On creating JLAB we wanted to utilise a similar mindset in the hope that we might be able to accelerate how we experiment and how we identify new opportunities.
Set themes that solve real business problems: One of the biggest learnings we took from year one of JLAB was that we needed to set themes that attempted to solve known business challenges. This meant that success for JLAB would be as a result of working, cross functionally, across the Partnership with key stakeholders that were closer to the types of problems we were seeing. We would then use these problems as our themes and as a result, have the appropriate buy in to ensure each of the selected ideas had a better chance of success.
Encourage inclusivity at every opportunity: One of the greatest benefits of being in the Partnership is the access we have as individuals, to a diverse community of people and skills. In 2014, JLAB was located in Canary Wharf and we were very fortunate to have access to a great environment where the teams had links to a great network of entrepreneurs. However, on reflection we decided to move JLAB back to our Victoria office as it was challenging to get Partners, regularly, over to Canary Wharf. We felt that having the startups in our Victoria office would be beneficial for them and for our Partners. We found that by doing this each startup felt like a Partner within the business and that we were able to launch more experiments in store or within our UX labs.
Provide a differentiated offer to startups: A core objective for JLAB is to attract the right type of startup so that we have a better chance of solving the identified business challenges. We approached this by creating a differentiated set of benefits for the successful applicants that included a desk in our Victoria office for 10 weeks, access to UX labs in John Lewis and Waitrose as well as access to a wide range of internal and external mentors.
Look outside your industry: The retail landscape is changing with emerging technologies and their application rapidly growing, especially within the intersection of different industries, leading to fast changing human values, expectations and behaviours. This is why we are not just looking at startups in retail, we are looking at startups in a wide range of vertical industries. We believe that this approach will enable the creation of unique market leading propositions.
I look forward to sharing more about JLAB 2018 in the coming weeks.
If you enjoyed this post, please clap or even comment — I’d love to hear your views.
