In September 2023, four Smart Innovation Challenge workshops were held in the UK, with 80 people from across our Cemex UK Materials business. During the workshops colleagues worked in groups and took part in various innovation games and activities to generate innovation ideas to solve real life business problems. Overall, 16 innovation ideas were generated and these were each pitched in the ‘Shark Tank’ to members of the UK Leadership team, who provided initial feedback on all proposals.
The pitches were videoed, and a summary of each idea shared with the West Europe Materials (WEM) Innovation Steering team who then scored each proposal against four criteria (scalability, feasibility, desirability, and viability) to identify which projects to take forwards. Of these, seven ideas were rejected on grounds of feasibility or duplication with current projects/processes. The remaining nine ideas were taken forward for further review and of those, seven ideas were sent for subject matter expert review and two ideas were put straight through for inclusion in the West Europe Portfolio for further development. Within the seven ideas sent for further review, some will be wrapped up within existing ongoing projects, whilst others will be collated as part of a wider P&IT development assessment.
The two ideas which were put straight through to the Innovation portfolio to be scoped and developed were ‘AI for concrete mix designs’ and ‘Carbon Capture Materials’. Project Managers have been assigned to both of these projects and they will be developed in 2024.
Off the back of the success of the UK workshops, Smart Innovation Challenge workshops have now been successfully run in France and Spain, following the same process as the UK. In France, 15 ideas were generated, of which three ideas have been put forward to the WEM project portfolio for development in 2024 and eighteen ideas were generated in Spain and the team are in the process of finalising the assessment.
The focus is now on the development of the ideas in our portfolio and we’ll review the potential to run further ‘How to Innovate’ sessions later in 2024.