Innovate to Succeed: Our Approach at the European Medical Group

A question I often get asked is what the word ‘innovation’ means to me. In truth I have no simple answer, despite that fact that it has always played a major part in the way I, and the European Medical Group (EMG) business as a whole, operates. In my experience innovation takes on many different meanings depending on who you are talking to, although in general I think many view it as finding unique and imaginative ways of solving a large problem. Here at the EMG, however, we have our own special take on the term, and I want to explain both what it means to our company in our day-to-day operations and also how we create an environment that enables innovative ideas to flourish. 

I believe that our definition of innovation ties in nicely with two of our core company values: different and proactive. A quality I always value in my team is the willingness to think about and suggest improvements that can be made to current processes: just because a way of doing something worked well in the past or even continues to work reasonably well, it doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. This is the mentality of gold medal winners, who are exactly the type of people I want in the company: to be the best in class you always have to be willing to adapt and improve what you do, and not settle for the way things have been done for a long time. I want all team members to be responsible for, and take pride in, their own work. Constantly adapting approaches and innovating is a huge aspect of that. 

That’s why we empower everyone in the company, beit a director, manager, or general team member – or implementor as I like to call them – to make suggestions for improvement. The message we send out is to not to be afraid to try new ideas: for every 10 ideas you have there might only be one that makes a real difference, but that still makes it very worthwhile in my view. As long as there is a logic and process behind it, then why not! It’s a similar concept to the approach innovative tech companies such as Google use where they reward people for every idea they have regardless of whether it works or not, just as long as the idea is trying to solve a problem that exists. 

One of the most important ways we’ve encouraged this sort of environment at the EMG has been when we introduced a continuous improvement team around 4 years ago. Rather than me trying to come up with all the ideas, we established this group which includes a representative from each department in the company who would sit together once a month to discuss all the ideas that had come in from across their respective teams. After looking at these in depth, and answering questions such as what the benefits are, what the costs would be, how it can improve the business, and how much time it would take to improve the business, some of these ideas would be put forward by the committee, and we would implement many of these. That wouldn’t be the end of it though, as those ideas would then be measured to see the results we were getting. And what we found is that the ones we thought would be really good didn’t necessarily pay off whereas others we didn’t think were as good often worked really well. This shows the importance of experimenting first before making any conclusions when it comes to innovation. 

As I’ve already mentioned, for me innovative ideas don’t have to be especially big or even original. All that matters is that they enhance performance. The approaches used by the Team Sky cycling team is a great example of how the most effective innovations can emerge from the simplest of ideas. My favourite one of these is when they looked at how they could get the best sleep for their cyclists, as this helps them perform better. One year each rider took their own pillows on tour with them and found they were sleeping better so the next year they extended this by taking their mattresses from hotel to hotel. This gave the riders an even better nights sleep and now it’s become part of their normal operations. For me that’s innovation at its best – it might not necessarily be something new or even particularly imaginative – but looking at something from outside your industry to improve a particular issue inside your industry. That’s exactly what we try to do here at the EMG.

So that’s a little overview of what innovation means to us and how we approach it at the EMG. In my opinion, this continuous focus on new ideas has been a big factor in the rapid growth of EMG we’ve enjoyed as a company since it was founded back in 2012. We certainly won’t be resting on our laurels though; we’ll carry on innovating to reach the very top of our game. Watch this space!