My name is John Vary and I am Innovation Manager at the John Lewis Partnership. I became a Partner with the John Lewis Partnership on Monday 6 January 2014. I joined from Burberry where I was Innovation Architect (2008–2013). Day one in the Partnership was mostly an immersion, unlocking what it means to be a Partner in a co-owned business and an overview of our Constitution, focusing on Principle One which is about the happiness of its Partners. The next week or so I was lined up to meet various Partners from across the business. The passion and energy from meeting these new colleagues was something I will never forget but in all honesty I knew, from day one, what I wanted to try and do and that was create an identity for innovation that would drive inclusivity for innovation and encourage others to think differently and revolutionise the way customers engaged with the brand.
I identified three areas that I believed would help me create this new technology innovation ecosystem. The areas were:
- People: Build a team of inter disciplined individuals that were fearless and curious to the point of obsession.
- Workshop: Create a physical space that would evoke a ‘thinking by making’ philosophy and enable experimentation at pace and blur the lines between physical and digital.
- Evangelise: Run a small team and focus on cross functional collaboration. If we could get this right in a business with over 87,700 Partners, the opportunities would be endless.
In March the same year I hired an intern by the name of Alex, so had started working on the ‘People’ part of the vision and from day two had begun evangelising ideas and thought leadership amongst stakeholders in the Partnership that I had identified to be key to our success — We will post about ‘success’ another time. All that was left was for me to find a space in 171 Victoria Street (John Lewis head office) for our skunkworks. After unsuccessfully exploring the corridors of the buildings basement a member of the facilities team contacted me to say they might have a room for me. We arranged a meeting to view this room, which turned out to be a cupboard, and thought it was the perfect space for us to build a skunkworks. It was non extravagant, it was mysterious, it was dirty but it was ours and we moved in that week.
Once we moved into our room we started building a presentation we could share with stakeholders, socialising the type of service we would look to provide in the skunkworks — more on skunkworks another time. By the time we moved in we had an additional person in the team, Sebastiaan who I had worked with previously at Burberry. Sebastiaan had an idea to create a logo that would help develop our identity for the skunkworks. He started to explore a honeycomb visual with different networks to help visualise how we would connect with other areas of the business. During this process Sebastiaan managed to, accidentally, overlap three of the five sided shapes in such a way the colour changed on three of the sides and made it look like the letter Y and from this moment on this place we called home was known as Room Y. Today, three years later, after a number of exciting projects, the addition of a Software developer, Room Y is still standing in the heart of Victoria.
Innovation is a fundamental part of the Partnership’s DNA and there is a number of different sources of innovation across the Partnership such as JLP Ventures, JLAB, Green Room, Online Product teams, Partner ideas — the list is endless. These areas are diverse and come from all parts of the Partnership and I believe that our unique business model and being co-owners enables us to align around the most important part of our world, the customer. There is undoubtedly a number of areas in this article that you will not have heard of and we will endeavour to bring these points to life in a number of follow up articles.
