In Conversation with Jo Hickson: Embedding Innovation as DNA
Jo Hickson is a corporate innovation leader who has spent over fifteen years building innovation functions from the ground up inside some of the world's largest retailers and helping senior leadership navigate emerging technologies.
Jackson Hatfield, Made by Many's latest addition to its Gen Z roster, sat down with Jo to explore what it takes to embed innovation into the DNA of a large organisation, and why, in the age of AI, the fundamentals of good practice matter more than ever.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Jo. You’ve spent a career building innovation engines in large scale retail organisations, with entrenched systems and established ways of working. With innovation perpetually trying to pull businesses in new directions, what would you say it takes to build effective innovation functions in these kinds of environments?
I think I can crystallise it into three areas. The first is — and this is probably the most important — executive-level proactive sponsorship, with the stress on the word “proactive”. I have found that corporate innovation doesn't thrive where leadership pays lip service to the concept of innovation but in practice is somewhat risk avoidant. It's easy to say no, but innovation is as much about proactively tackling future risk as it is having ambition for the future. Innovation, generally, is a muscle to use within a business.
The second one is people. I’m talking about the fact that innovation is hard, and you need people that relish hard problems, and are not phased by complexity and ambiguity. They have a changemakers mindset, and they question the status quo. These people are inherently curious about life, the world, and business. It’s also a team-sport. Innovation is not solely the mandate of any dedicated function, and I think our corporates need to increasingly realise that innovation can't be a thing that happens in some ivory tower, or it simply won’t integrate naturally into the business.
The third one is clarity on what innovation means for that organisation, which sounds so obvious, but innovation is actually one of those words that's really overused. It can mean many things to many people. Everyone needs to be on the same page about what innovation is going to do for them and the organisation, and critically what it isn't going to do for them. Those, there, are my three enablers of success.
I want to pick up on what you said about innovation as a muscle to be flexed. As a changemaker, do you know when a challenge requires more than that same muscle to be flexed, but perhaps to train a new one entirely? How do you know when an organisation needs to reimagine what innovation looks like, rather than changing strategies but keeping the engine the same?
So, the red flags for me are when innovation is haphazard. Worse, still, is when it’s secretive. When initiatives fail somewhat expensively at early MVP stages, when there’s no governance or accountability frameworks, when those foundational components aren’t in place, then innovation ends up being accidental, rather than purposeful.
If you think about innovation in terms of driving new value for ambitious organisations, why wouldn’t you want to put structure and rigor around the process of innovation? If that's not in place, then the likelihood is you’re not going to get the receipts from your effort, nor see the ROI of your work, particularly when it’s secretive, If you’re running teams where nobody else what you’re doing, they’re not going to buy into what you’re doing, and then your efforts never see the light of day. And that’s when innovation fails.
You raise an interesting point about clarity of process. Particularly in this ‘Age of AI’, there seems to be a lot of confusion/uncertainty around innovation directions. Do you think there's a risk that AI's speed works against good innovation?
Right now, I am grappling with what needs to stay and what needs to change. I’m seeing a lot of solutions out there where we can partner with AI, but one thing I’m seeing is that accelerating to an answer means not spending enough time in the problem space. For an organisation to do innovation well, it needs to do involve humans. I’m not saying things won’t shift, and there will be new tools to leverage and many changes to make, but I do think much of it will need to stay good practice as we drive new business models, or even entirely new businesses.
How do you think these decisionmakers should be considering Horizon 1 and Horizon 3 innovation? With the emergence of AI and an ever-increasing rate of change, do you think there’s any point in considering what we should be building in 5 years time?
This idea of horizons is up to 30 years old now. I think there’s still some validity in this idea, but if you’re a large corporate with an ambitious, growth mindset, I think you can start to collapse those horizons, so that the problem definition phase that might feel like Horizon 3 can be dragged into H2 or even H1. They don’t feel fixed anymore. I feel that they’re quite fluid. And looking 5 years ahead, I’d actually say that the pace of change means it’s more important than ever to be looking further ahead. Short-term thinking doesn’t win when change is a constant. You need to give space for foresight and for the future despite the short-term natures of operating a business.
Traditional innovation tends to follow pretty repetitive processes — ideation, research, testing, iteration. But as AI starts to reshape how teams can explore and experiment, what from that traditional playbook do you think can be left behind —and, perhaps more importantly, what needs to be protected?
This is something that I’m really grappling with right now. I’ve started using some tools that are exciting me, but what I’m convinced about now is the risk of AI shifting away from taste, judgment, and trust. I think if you’re reinventing the playbook to accommodate and maximise these tools, handing over to AI the taste, the judgment, and the trust that innovation requires, is a really dangerous place to be. I have a healthy interest in how things are shifting, but I’ve also got a healthy interest in ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.
Do you think there’s a scenario where these can go hand-in-hand? If generative AI brings unprecedented output scale but poor taste, and humans bring discernment but are far worse at scale, can a healthy relationship be found somewhere in this space?
I think if there’s a strong dose of realism between what each can bring to the party, and a demarcation of roles between your team and your AI companions, and everyone fully understands these roles and accountabilities, then yes. Personally, I’m excited for the future, because it’s here and happening, so to your question I would say that these are the questions we can only answer through exploring what we can do with these tools today.
You made it clear earlier that innovation has to create value for the wider business, not just itself. As someone who has built innovation teams from the ground up, whentrying to scale emerging tech innovation across an organisation, where does friction most often show up? And how should teams withstand it?
I think it needs to be less about innovation theatre, which was a luxurious time about a decade ago where innovation teams were creating shiny and techy things that looked good in a lab but were never really designed for scale. I always say that if you end up running innovation teams, you're not there to make your own team look good — you're there to create value for the rest of the business. Put yourself in the shoes of the managers and leaders of other functions. What are their pain points? What problems can you solve collaboratively for them? If you can articulate how you're the solution provider to their challenges, they'll naturally shift into a collaborative space.
My advice now is don't start anything if you can't articulate the potential future value of that initiative. I don’t mean 50-page business cases — if you're starting something quite embryonic, you may not be able to do that. But if you can't articulate at maturity what this would unlock for us as a business, then don't start it.
