CHAPTER 5
WHAT BIG BUSINESS CAN LEARN FROM STARTUPS
When he was chief executive of Asda, the British supermarkets group, Allan Leighton heard about a business-changing innovation. It wasn’t judging customer preferences by tracking their eye movements. Nor was it using artificial intelligence to assess the best shelf positions for popular products. It was a banana button.
The Asda check-out staff told him that, as bananas were the biggest-selling item in the stores, they could speed up purchases through the till if there was a single button they could press every time a bunch of bananas passed the cash register. That single innovation improved check-out productivity by 20 per cent.
‘Oh, and another thing,’ the check-out staff said. ‘The glass ...
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