Steve Sargent is a Chief Product Officer at Triumph Motorcycles, with overall responsibility for the product strategy and future product roadmap. Steve recognised the need to innovate to stay ahead of their competitors and attending Innovation Excellence Masterclass allowed him to understand exactly how to go about initiating their innovation process and hear from more experienced executives what works and what doesn’t to avoid making the same mistakes.

My Challenges: We see a challenge coming towards our industry and recognise that a way to get out of that is through being innovative. We’ve been looking for something along these lines for a while. Once we understood the structure behind the Masterclass and what’s involved in it, it seemed like the perfect fit for developing our innovation initiative.

How Gemba Helped: What benefitted us is having the opportunity to speak to people who have a lot of experience using an innovation process. They shared with us what structures they have in place, what works and doesn’t work. For people like us who are looking for a new approach to innovation, having that resource is invaluable. We are also able to then go back to them and share our ideas to get their feedback based on their own experiences. They’re all senior guys and their opinion carries a lot of credibility. The Masterclass itself was very well organised and the Leader clearly knew what he was talking about. It’s all gone through a logical sequence, starting from the front-end of the process and what we should be doing at that stage and then leading you through next steps. The fact that it’s easy to follow made it easier to then go back to the head office and explain how we can improve innovation at Triumph. I also really enjoyed getting to know everyone, going out for dinner together and making valuable connections.