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It's no news to anyone that innovation has become a powerful force that drives many companies to be more resilient and ready to stand out in an increasingly competitive world. As they know the strategic value of innovation, they are increasingly focusing on this aspect, such as developing new services, investing in more technology for their processes, or even thinking about actions that can generate a differential for their clients and consumers. According to a study by the McKinsey consultancy, businesses that consistently invest in innovation are more likely to achieve sustainable growth and have a revenue growth rate up to 2.6 times higher compared to others.

One of the factors that encourage this search for innovation is consumer power. With the world in constant transformation and changes taking place at an accelerated pace, consumers now have unlimited access to information and are demandingcustomized experiences.These expectations are seen in all aspects, including in the workplace. In this context, the challenge is being prepared to meet new demands with solutions that transform customer experience and result in business growth. It is essential to be aware of the journeys of everyone who interacts with our brands, seeking to leverage this experience through innovation.

It is important, however, to stress that when we talk about innovation, we are talking about changes based on new ideas and new ways of operating, and not only on disruptive solutions and state-of-the-art technology. At Sodexo, we face the challenge of constantly adapting to our customers’ reality, immersed in different cultures and regions. Incremental innovations are equally important, especially for more complex operations, such as Sodexo’s, where the diversity of cultures and activity areas demand that we adapt to different realities and aspirations. In this sense, people are the ones who shape and drive transformation since they are our interlocutors with the clients and experience the challenges closely, actively listening to understand the specificities of the client's business and what innovations will contribute positively to theconsumer experience. When we consider all these aspects, we remainrelevant and differentiate ourselves in such a competitive market.

This is an intrinsic concept at Sodexo. We are committed to fostering innovation in our teams, allowing them to think outside the box and propose ideas that can be catalyzed and turned into solutions that add value for customers. Internal programs, such as the Innovation Challenge, aim to encourage employees from across the organization worldwide to share ideas so that we can test and implement suggestions, which range from using technologies to small innovations that directly impact our customer’s real needs.

 Focusing on compliance and security during technology integration allows organizations to build a strong framework for their Compliance Programs, ensuring they meet regulatory requirements while also enhancing overall operational efficiency. 

We encourage our teams on a daily basis to perform activities with an ‘entrepreneurial vision,' seeking to achieve increasingly better results with a committed and responsible performance. We recognize the importance of taking some risks – as long as they are calculated and occur in controlled environments – so that we can learn and generate quantitative and qualitative data. We compute, analyze, measure, and interpret all this information.

We attach great importance to all the indicators we producebecause we use them to direct our work and become increasingly guided by this precious information, which also feeds back into our global database. This global sharing through our internal platforms helps us improve our performance on a daily basis, enables us to import solutions that other regions have already tested, and exports what is working well locally.

In addition to encouraging intrapreneurship practices, which are driven by the team’s proximity to customers for responding quickly and effectively to specific demands, we also invest in a strong open innovation agenda. Sodexo was born as a startup more than 50 years ago and has transformed and adapted over time, and today, as a multinational with different business models, it understands and values startup skills and abilities. Through open innovation, we gain more dynamism in transformation processes, product development, and innovation, which results in more agility and increased adaptability to the most varied scenarios and customer realities.

To support thecompany’s evolution along those lines, we have developed a solid open innovation ecosystem and have been making challenges in the market, seeking collaboration from startups and universities for building new solutions. An example of this is Sodexo's partnership with ACATE - Associação Catarinense de Tecnologia(Catarinense Association of Technology, in free translation), which has helped us to share our internal demands and challenges identified through an innovation and technology ecosystem. In addition, we also have Sodexo Accelerator in several countries around the world, where we work in collaboration with local incubators, enabling us to meet the most different business needs. Currently, there are 14 accelerators in seven regions, including countries such as France, Brazil, China, India, Sweden,the United Kingdom, and the United States.

We need to be connected with all the technological advances taking place globally, but more than that, we need to be close to our customers to understand their expectations. For this, it is essential that we continue to encourage teams to perform their activities with an entrepreneurial vision so we can innovate with purpose, meeting needs and also experimenting in the workplace because whatever the focus of the company's activities, only one thing is certain for us: transformation will continue to happen, and innovation is a key factor forincreasingly providing value, both for people and for the business.