WE SEE CHANGE
AS AN
OPPORTUNITY
Ignite aims to focus and accelerate innovation activities across all areas of the business, acting as a catalyst to pioneer a new De Beers and diamond world.
What we do
Ventures
Research
Incubation
Tech Sales & Services
The Ignite Vision
Ignite is born out of a collection of multidisciplinary, highly specialised people from the fields of research, incubation, technology and venturing.
We look ahead, do the things that might never have been done before and find ways to drive growth — despite the world’s unrelenting change.
We let our strategy inform innovation and our learning from testing innovative ideas inform our strategy. At the heart of our approach is a constant search for new viable business models and cutting-edge new technologies that have strong potential to create new revenue streams and recharge existing ones.
Why innovate?
Innovation fuels the majority of the world’s long-term productivity and economic growth, and is a critical, differentiating capability for corporates. Innovative companies significantly outperform others, delivering greater consumer and customer value, driving greater revenue and employment growth and improving the societies in which they operate.
In today’s era of rapid transformation and disruption, embracing change is a necessity. Digital disruption, driven by the convergence of multiple technology innovations enabled by connectivity are shortening product lifecycles, accelerating market and price transparency, and transforming business models.
The diamond industry and De Beers is no different but driving innovation successfully requires fundamentally different ways of working to be adopted at scale.
It’s not enough to just maintain or defend our existing profitable business model. We must also pioneer the development of new business that can create new forms of value for the company. In today’s world, we have to do both.
Neil Ventura
Executive Vice President, Strategy & Innovation
To prosper, De Beers balances the need to optimise the performance of today’s business, and simultaneously explore new business—all at speed.
We selectively abandon the past, proactively drop ideas that are no longer relevant or valuable in a changing world, and put equal value on what has not worked as much as what has.
Ignite provides a disciplined, repeatable approach and a common innovation ‘language’ across the Group. We’re passionate about three things: developing great ideas, testing them rapidly and economically, and delivering impact on De Beers' performance.
We look ahead, do the things that might never have been done before and find ways to drive growth — despite the world’s unrelenting change.
We also collaborate with the most innovative universities in the United Kingdom and Southern Africa.
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