Innovation & Technology
Structured innovation groups that bring together similar, non-competing hospitality businesses around a shared challenge—pooling insight, resource and investment to solve problems none could tackle alone.
Think Hospitality designs and facilitates special interest groups (SIGs) that unite operators, brands or investors facing a common problem. Each group is built around a tightly defined challenge—whether that is reducing food waste at scale, rethinking labour models, accelerating digital ordering adoption, or exploring emerging technologies such as AI-led personalisation.
Participants are deliberately selected as non-competing entities so that knowledge sharing is open and commercially safe: a hotel group, a contract caterer and an airport F&B operator, for example, each bringing a different perspective on the same underlying issue. Think Hospitality acts as the independent convener, setting the agenda, curating expertise, commissioning shared research and ensuring every participant extracts actionable value.
We begin by identifying a problem space where collective action offers a genuine advantage over individual effort. We then approach and vet prospective members, ensuring complementary rather than overlapping interests, and establish a governance framework covering IP, confidentiality and shared investment.
The group typically operates across a structured programme of workshops, site visits, expert briefings and collaborative working sessions over a defined period. We bring in specialist contributors—technologists, academics, supply-chain innovators—as the challenge demands. Between sessions, we manage the research workstream, track actions and maintain momentum so the group delivers outcomes rather than simply conversation.
A structured programme of collaborative sessions, shared research and specialist briefings that delivers a collectively developed solution framework, implementation playbook and, where applicable, jointly funded pilot projects or proof-of-concept trials ready for each participant to deploy within their own business.
