Our Dragons' Den initiative - a quest for innovation and growth

Transcript

My name’s Anna Betts and I look after the Sales and Marketing team for Transaction Services (TS) at PwC in the UK.

This year in TS we spent a lot of time focusing on innovation. And one of the key initiatives that we’ve run across the whole of TS this year has been the ‘Growth & Innovation challenge’.

I think this initiative was different to other PwC initiatives - this was to encourage everyone in Transaction Services to think more innovatively.  It involved everyone at every single grade, across the whole of the UK and within the sector teams we asked them to come up with new ideas which could could either be new products, new services or create areas of efficiency in the way we deliver value to our clients.

Out of an impressive 53 ideas we shortlisted 11,  and these ideas then went through to a Dragons' Den panel.  And the panel was made up of 10 PwC partners, who very much enjoyed playing the roles of the Dragons'.

Having spoken to the Dragons' after the panel stage, I know that they were really impressed by the commitment and the hard work that our teams had put into preparing for the panels, but also they were incredibly impressed by the commerciality of the ideas that people had come up with.

We decided to run this initiative because it’s really important in terms of our strategy for Transaction Services if we want to become unassailable in the market, we need to be constantly innovating.  And it really brought together the collective power of everybody in Transaction Services in a fun, interesting, commercial way. The real benefit to our clients of doing this was that we’ve come up with three really strong ideas that ultimately will enable us to deliver our services better to those clients.