'This year the challenge focuses on an enterprise innovation opportunity - curate the exceptional for future generations'

What's your role at JLR?

My role at JLR is Range Rover Brand Strategy Manager, I started this position back in October 2024 so it is still quite new! However, I have been with JLR and Range Rover now for two years, with my previous position being as Range Rover Product Strategy Manager. In my role I have the privilege of defining the future of one of the worlds most iconic brands, creating the strategic direction to enable the unprecedented growth.

My team sits at the heart of the JLR enterprise, ensuring the business embodies modern luxury across the end-to-end lifecycle. Within the team, my role is to develop robust strategies which enable us to make informed and calculated decisions to grow the brand. These strategies touch all areas of the Brand ecosystem centred around but not limited to the following key areas, vehicles, brand enhancers and brand experiences.

Tell us about the Graduate Innovation Challenge.

The Graduate Innovation Challenge (GIC) is an annual JLR competition, in which teams of second year graduates tackle a wide range of innovative projects. From ideating the vehicles of the future, to improving current JLR processes, the challenge has helped to develop some incredible projects; leading to new patents, features and initiatives. With a focus on the professional development of graduates, the GIC utilises their fresh perspectives and skills to tackle broad real business problems, leaving a lasting impact on the future of JLR.

What is your involvement in the GIC?

Within the GIC I act as a consultant for the GIC Leadership Team, comprising entirely of Graduates, and a Judge of the final competition which concludes in summer each year.

How has it developed over the last couple of years?

My involvement began in 2023 after being introduced to the challenge by a Graduate in my team who was responsible for leading the GIC that year. After a 3-month placement with Product Strategy being exposed to the earliest parts of the PCDS framework, a nucleus for innovation, I had the foresight to realise GIC had the potential to play a much greater role in the business. Reflecting on challenges of the past, we identified there was a need for greater business alignment to ensure the GIC was having maximum impact on the future of the business. Calculating that the collective power of the graduates, which at the time was 289 individuals, equated to over 20 years of ideation work completed over the course of just a few weeks we set out to reimagine its potential.

As a test case, in 2024 we restructured to move from open source innovation to targeted innovation against a specific problem statement. At the time this was set by Product Strategy against one of the greatest innovation opportunities of the time, to make Range Rover the most desirable luxury product by 2035. This shift resulted in a wave of innovation and although there can only be one winner, another major change was the creation of a formal GIC handover document logging each and every idea in detail following the conclusion of the event to ensure a closed loop innovation cycle. Where appropriate ideas are directed from here towards the correct chapter and progressed in line with standard business operations. Positioning GIC as an innovation pipeline for the business ensures the enterprise and the graduates, gain maximum value from the time dedicated to this initiative. The ultimate goal is to enable the graduates, the future leaders of our business, an opportunity to participate in defining its trajectory.  

What are your future hopes for the challenge?

For the 2025 challenge I have remained heavily involved with the GIC leadership team employing the second phase of the GIC’s reimagination, expanding from one team setting the problem statement, to an innovation committee representing multiple innovation hubs across the business.

This year the challenge focuses on an enterprise innovation opportunity - curate the exceptional for future generations - the aspiration of this change is to encourage a broader spectrum of creativity beyond engineering innovation. Additionally with the inclusion of two new countries to the GIC Graduate Cohort this year, Slovakia and China, the number of minds contributing to this diverse pool of thought is nearly doubling to that of 2024, we are also running a pilot with apprentices to see if we can find a level of involvement for a greater number of early careers individuals. Equally our priority remains, not just high quality output but also high quality education with greater opportunities for graduate development through structured skills workshops and guided mentoring processes. I am very much looking forwards to supporting the graduates through this year’s challenge and continuing to making GIC pivotal to our enterprise and the wider Tata group.