During 2023, we placed greater emphasis on our Innovation pillar. Innovation is one of our key strategic priorities and it was also added as a core value in 2023.

Throughout the TCL Group during 2023, we introduced several new initiatives in our innovation strategy to promote a culture of innovation. We introduced the “HEART” principle, which was our Innovation roadmap used to guide the strategic innovation focus in 2023. Heart spoke to the passion that we bring as a Caribbean region, in all that we do. We must be passionate about automating our business processes, introducing new and emerging technologies, and finding disruptive solutions to achieve our ultimate goal of carbon neutrality.

We started off the year with conducting several focus groups across our cluster to understand our employees’ pain points with respect to innovation and the innovation process.

Using the feedback from these sessions we were able to create a comprehensive Exposure and Communication Campaign where we introduced “Innovation Tuesdays”. Every Tuesday, we would share content, videos, articles and relevant information relating to Innovation with our employees via email.

We also saw the need for greater Training and development of our employees in our innovation methodologies of Agile and Design Thinking. We therefore held two innovation bootcamp sessions in Trinidad and Jamaica, where we trained 45 of our employees in the innovation tools and concepts. This two-day immersive training allowed our employees to learn in more detail about our innovation methodologies.

Following this training, our 45 new Ambassadors were celebrated in a Recognition and Recognition ceremony where they emphasized the importance of becoming the champions of innovation throughout the organization based on their new learnings.

We also recognized our Ideators, our employees who submitted their ideas into the CEMEX Smart Innovation portal, of which 6 of our Group’s ideas made it through CEMEX’s Regional Innovation Committee Reviews and were admitted into CEMEX’s Regional Innovation Portfolio. During 2023, we also launched our Smart Innovation Champion’s Competition amongst our Cluster’s where each country competed with each other to vie for the exclusive TCLG Champions Trophy. This year our cluster of Trinidad & Tobago won our competition with the submission of 41 ideas into the portal.

As a result of the implementation of these new initiatives, during 2023, we saw an increase of +>100% in innovative ideas entered into CEMEX’s Smart Innovation portal. This has been a record year for our Group.

During 2024, we anticipate that innovation will continue to be a major component of our Group and plan to embark on key initiatives to further enhance a culture of innovation and the recognition of disruptive ideas.