Our July 2025 members’ meeting featured Jo Hickson, Director of Innovation at Stockholm-based retailer H&M Group, and the former head of Tesco Labs. Scott Cohen moderated a conversation with InnoLead members; the video replay is available here. Among the topics they covered:
- The evolution of innovation roles: Hickson described how innovation has shifted from isolated labs to a more integrated business partnering approach, emphasizing the need for innovation to be embedded within core business functions rather than operating on the periphery.
- Challenges in scaling innovation: The discussion highlighted that moving from experimentation to organization-wide scale is often the hardest part of innovation, requiring advocacy, capability building, and leadership sponsorship.
- The impact and use of AI and emerging technologies: Both Tesco and H&M are leveraging AI for business insights, supply chain optimization, and understanding customer trends, with a forward-looking interest in quantum computing and robotics for future innovation.
- Collaborating with startups: Hickson shared lessons learned from working with startups, including the importance of mutual understanding, realistic expectations, and even providing training to startups about the grocery business to ensure successful partnerships.
- The rise of global consumer tribes and trend detection: The conversation explored how social platforms are creating global, mission-driven consumer groups that influence culture and purchasing, and how AI can help businesses detect and capitalize on these emerging trends.
“I think storytelling is probably one of the most important muscles to exercise for an innovation manager,” Hickson said, “being able to convince [and] persuade in a way that feels like it was their idea in the first place. I see that as the role of the innovator. …If you manage to make them feel like they were the one that originated the idea, because you story told in such a way that you’ve got buy-in, that’s so good.”
She also talked about getting experiments to the scale-up phase. “In my experience, that’s always the hard part of any innovation brief,” she said. “It’s relatively easy in most businesses to be able to get to doing a trial, some small scale MVP… But then, if it has achieved all of the KPIs that you set for that particular initiative, and it’s very obvious that you’ve got a very good idea that should be allowed to scale within the organization, then having that organization set up in order to be able to take something through to scale, [there is often] a disconnect between how businesses run normally and how they need to change their machine in order to fit in the new, and that can often feel quite schizophrenic to business teams. …How do we get it to scale, and [get] the organization to embrace it actively — and leadership too?”
Featured image by Ramneek Singh on Unsplash.
