Retail Innovation Council (RIC) and dunnhumby have today announced a new partnership to bring pioneering innovation insights to Europe’s leading retailers. The partnership starts today with the launch of the dunnhumby Retail Innovation Index (RIX) for RIC’s executive members.
By leveraging its executive committees, the RIC will act as a collaborative platform for continued evolution of innovation best practices and industry-wide change. This collaboration will be powered from aggregated insights identified by the dunnhumby RIX methodology, which utilises a combination of dunnhumby ventures’ retail innovation expertise and industry-recognised dunnhumby strategic consulting and research capabilities.
“By partnering with long-standing retail technology leader dunnhumby, we will be able to move towards elevating innovation practices across the region while individually supporting each of our executive council members in their leadership roles”, said Sandeep Arora, chair of the Retail Innovation Council and UK Launchpad.
This launch marks the start of ongoing collaboration between the partners focused on streamlining how retailers choose what innovation to adopt and their ecosystem partner selection decisions. dunnhumby will deliver confidential insights to each research participant providing them with industry-wide innovation ranking and personalised innovation strategy recommendations. The process will identify key organisational blockers, adoption-ready opportunity areas, and actionable priorities.
dunnhumby will also support the RIC and its partner network by developing a new standardised scorecard for choosing technology startups based on their retail adoption readiness. As part of the partnership, Sandeep Arora, the Chair of the RIC joins the Judging Committee for dunnhumby’s newly launched Ecosystem Startup of the Year competition.
Leo Nagdas, head of corporate development & innovation at dunnhumby, joins the RIC to lead its Strategy & Innovation Executive Steering Committee: “With over fifty thousand organisations claiming to operate in the AI space this ecosystem explosion is disrupting retailer and brand innovation decisions due to an overabundance of choices – which use cases, when, and with which vendors to test”, said Leo Nagdas. “Legacy research providers and generalist innovation advisors may fail to account for foundational end consumer preferences and retail persona decisions. Our specialty expertise, combined with RIC’s executive platform, can guide industry executives towards clarity in today’s uncertain times.”
The RIX will initially be offered exclusively to the RIC members and the dunnhumby partner network. Senior retailer executives interested in supporting the initiative are invited to request to join the RIC and the dunnhumby Retail Innovation Network. Both communities are exclusive but complimentary for senior retail executives.
