The innovation programme that inspired Sky Glass

How can we help a culture of innovation to spread?

We’ve worked closely with the head of learning and development at Sky to build and rollout an innovation programme for all 600 Sky leaders. Every aspect of the innovation and creativity learning experience is designed to suit Sky’s culture.

This was achieved by running a series of design sprints to deeply understand the need, the appetite for innovation, and perception of creativity.

Initial designs for the Better Innovation programme were prototyped, and elements were user-tested to ensure everything felt intuitive and matched Sky’s culture.

The two-day programme was rolled out to leaders in cohorts and enabled a real culture of innovation and creativity to spread. It involved engagement with real customers and a challenge for business leaders to come up with ideas to improve the business, one of which inspired the creation of SKY Glass.

It also featured an assessment of leaders’ own team culture of innovation, and identified ways they could better support their teams . The programme had the highest Net Promoter Score any programme at Sky has ever received.

Leaders told us that they went on to use the tools and the process we taught them with their teams to empower them to take more risks, test their assumptions and engage customers when developing new offerings.

This work inspired Sky to create its own internal Labs team. We then worked with the team to help them master facilitation of design workshops.