About Nick Lansley

Nick Lansley is one of the founders of UK retailer Tesco’s online service, serving online customers with wine, books and groceries from the mid-1990s. Nick formed Tesco’s first innovation team in 2000, testing and implementing new technologies to help make work simpler and easier for colleagues. He also shaped new customer offerings such as the ‘Tesco Access’ site for blind customers and the first mobile phone app for grocery shopping in 2003 as well as the first Tesco iPhone app in 2009.

Nick has championed open innovation through Tesco Labs, creating the Tesco API for groceries and engaging with the third party developer community with ‘TJAM’ events where start-ups can meet Tesco executives. Now ex-Tesco, Nick describes himself as an “Innovation Insider” with a passion for bringing pragmatic innovation techniques and ways-of-working to areas of business that want to start their own innovation teams, or who are struggling to get traction with innovation projects. Nick works with many clients who want to start or improve the innovation faculty within their organisations. Nick also speaks and facilitators at retail and innovation conferences around the world.

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Nick Says:

Hello! After quarter of a century working in retail I have found myself with an interesting set of skills and experience to push innovation forward on behalf of customers and colleagues.

Innovation in retail isn’t easy. Today’s retailers are often running on low margins and feeling risk adverse, so messages from the innovation culture around ‘trying and failing’ as if it is some sort of desired goal don’t sit well. Retail leaders want results – and results to them are improvements to their bottom line.

Steering retail leaders into the mindset that ‘innovation is good’ is something I do. Bringing people with me on a journey that allows them to see the value of assigning budget to experimentation and prototyping, trying, failing, and trying again is how I do it.

This blog explores some of that mindset, interspersed with the excited geek in me that looks at the connected home, internet of things and great new technologies.

Come with me on this journey, and let me convince you that innovation is good!

As for me, I live on the clifftop overlooking the sea near Brighton with my husband Bernard. I love mountain cycling, quad biking, scenic photography, delicious craft ciders, and I am an amateur radio station operator, callsign G1KZI.

All the views and opinions I express on this site are my own.