GRADUATE INNOVATION CHALLENGE 2022-23 HAS ARRIVED!

This year’s Graduate Innovation Challenge (GIC) kicked off with a fantastic launch event at the start of December.

On Thursday 1 December, we held the Graduate Innovation Challenge Launch Event, a scheme where graduates work on innovative projects to address real business problems or opportunities within Jaguar Land Rover. It was attended both virtually and in person by graduates across the UK, India and Shannon.

Overall, this event was a huge success, with our graduates feeling inspired and excited to embark on this year’s challenge. We had some truly inspiring speakers throughout the day from different areas of the business.

Natasha Ho spoke on Open Innovation, Simon Barnes introduced the Customer Focus and Carla Woodhouse spoke about Research Innovation.

Aram Kradjian, Chief Research Engineer, gave the opening talk of the day as our Key Speaker. He had some brilliant benchmarks on tackling the factors we have to include when developing our ideas, with sustainability and cost being at the higher mark. He truly gave the real-world perspective to problem solving and developing.

We hope graduates take on this important piece of advice as they take on their projects after the start of the new year.

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In addition, this year's launch included interactive aspects where graduates (in-person and online) conjured ideas with out of the box thinking in workshops within small groups. Some of these included:

• A boot floor which also operated as a removable/buildable table
• An integrated Vacuum cleaner
• A deployable drone for road advances and tricky road surfaces,
• Better IT audit systems for fleet management/ manager car scheme
• Metaverse showroom concept

During the lunch period, graduates were able to explore some stalls run by innovative workstreams in the company and previous winners. Some of our speakers were also able to join and engage in discussions with graduates. 

Following the launch, the graduates attended a series of ideation workshops run by existing Jaguar Land Rover workstreams aligned to our strategic themes across our six innovation themes, where they had the opportunity to explore the workstream areas and generate ideas around project ideas. Graduates were also able to submit their own project ideas.         

Looking ahead to the new year, our graduates will start their project development with their allocated teams. We are hoping to see a wide array of innovative and exciting ideas that will hopefully lead to solutions to business-wide issues and challenges. We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who helped with planning this day, and to the graduates joining us online and in-person! We really couldn’t have done it without you.

As always, if a team reaches out to you, and you would like some more information regarding what you or your team can do to help, then please do not hesitate to contact us through our email: jlrgic@jaguarlandrover.com.

We also have a dedicated organising team led by Jo Heymann (jheyman1). This team is made up of our Process Leads, Jonathon Saad (jsaad1) and Shaylin Patel (spatel63), our Comms Leads, Christina Vale (cvale1) and Toby Rankin (trankin), and our Events Lead, Dan Butlin (dbutlin3). To keep updated with the GIC, visit our website: Graduate Innovation Challenge (GIC) (sharepoint.com).