Property giant Mirvac’s innovation group Hatch has been at the heart of its customer-centric approach since 2014. Describing the group as a “corporate innovation incubator”, Mirvac’s Chief Digital Officer William Payne spoke to iTnews Digital Nation about how Hatch has driven business-led innovation.
“[Hatch is] ultimately a team of people who are able to bring innovation thinking, design thinking, lean optimisation strategies, and so on, into business problems across our organisation. And even working directly with our customers and for industry problems,” says Payne.
“They have some fantastic methodologies around how we scan the various stakeholders involved to really, truly understand the problem, and indeed what we call a job to be done.”
The projects range from individual innovation projects, to large scale solutions to societal problems, such as how to track and manage embodied carbon. Payne says that two of the ideas born out of Hatch over the years have become ongoing commercial enterprises.
“It's a really interesting capability and fabulous from my perspective to be able to support digital innovation and digital thinking to have that embedded in the organisation. And it's been there for a number of years.”
While Hatch doesn’t actually do the work itself, they are responsible for the facilitation of bringing the right members of the business together to work on the problem.
“They help them through a standard methodology that they have built themselves to actually rebuild themselves, that incorporates all the innovation elements that you would expect to see,” says Payne.
“So that's how you ensure that it's a business-led innovation, not an island of innovation.
“And I think that's probably why it's been so successful, and it has been able to really get into some meaty and interesting problems.”
