Innovation is present on a daily basis as part of the corporate culture of Foyer through the Innovation Hub, created in 2016 with the support of the Executive Committee on the basis of a collaborative innovation model, with applied methods, projects, products and links with the ecosystem. Led by the CEO Marc Lauer, the Innovation Hub deals with innovation governance and offers solutions for the following two challenges:
Hub Innovation
A core value and pillar of the Group’s strategy, innovation has been part of Foyer’s DNA since its creation.
Core innovation
Commonly referred to as “incremental innovation”, this focuses on our different business lines and allows us to guarantee service quality, competitiveness, efficiency and profitability through governance which aligns innovation with strategy and the operational model.
Edge innovation
This type of innovation is more disruptive and possibly less obvious, however it allows Foyer to innovate with its business model in order to introduce new sources of growth.
As well as responding to these challenges, the Innovation Hub coordinates the two main complementary pillars, namely internal innovation and open innovation, together with the start-up ecosystem in pursuit of the following aims:
Internal innovation
This encourages all employees to be involved in innovation with the aim of “creating innovators through innovations”.
Open innovation
By maintaining the position of major innovative financial player, and by benefiting from the richness of cooperation with start-ups, incubators, accelerators and innovation clubs and taking inspiration from innovations in our sector, also from a number of other industries.
To inspire innovation, the missions of the Innovation Hub are built around three levers: culture, collaboration and ecosystem.
Culture
To enable innovation to become an integral part of the corporate culture, we have put in place various innovation assimilation initiatives, such as our “Brown Bag sessions”, which are held twice a month on the various innovation topics, and our daily internal newsletter monitoring strategic innovation.Collaboration
Our governance is based on a collaborative innovation model, because innovation must not be concentrated on certain people or services, but must emerge from all employees.We do not innovate alone!Through a clear process called “the cycle of ideas”, our innovation coordinators support employees from the emergence of ideas to their realisation in real value-creating solutions for Foyer, its network, its partners and its clients. Since 2017, Foyer has regularly organised innovation challenges, such as annual internal hackathons, very popular events dedicated to co-creating new ideas, working together with innovative methodologies, but with time constraints that make the challenge exciting. Numerous solutions devised in these hackathons have seen the light of day, such as Kaskou, our family board game to combat accidents in the home involving children. Watch the Hackathon video
Ecosystem
Foyer is very well connected to Luxembourg’s innovation system, thanks to various local partners (LHoFT, LOIC, SnT of the University of Luxembourg) and international partners (PlugAndPlay). These partnerships and strategic collaborations fuel our open innovation approach, a real tool available to all employees, which has enabled Foyer to innovate, particularly through numerous partnerships with start-ups.Discover our partners
