The Global Lottery Innovation Panel spotlighted innovation activities for the Canadian and European lottery industry.
Matt Godfrey, Chair of European Lotteries Innovation Group (ELIG) and Head of Commercial Strategy & Innovation, Camelot UK, explained the three different innovation organizations in Europe. They are separate entities, with different purposes.
ELIG is a group of 14 European lotteries. “It is a part of EL, which oversees 80 lotteries and this group has 14 lotteries in it . . . This is about sharing best practice, case studies and bringing people together to network,” said Godfrey.
COLAB is an innovation lab, creating new game ideas and testing them. “It’s a joint venture between the four Nordics, FDJ and Camelot,” said Godfrey. “It is an innovation lab. It is targeted at creating propositions that will be appealing to younger generations. We’ve reached a number of conclusions: No one solution is going to solve the problem so we have to develop lots. We are going to fail a lot. So we need to set up a system that lets us fail a lot and share the risks of failure. And we need to share insights together. We’ve all put the same amount of money in, we’ve all put a full time employee in, and we’ve all agreed to equal market testing time.”
The Euro Millions Innovation Group is a newly established group of innovation managers drawn from the Euro Millions community. “We are trying to launch new propositions using the infrastructure beyond the original game. Euro Millions took a long time to launch. It is a mature game. We have access to 250 million population, so what we could create with new games could be enormous,” he said.
In Canada, the Interprovincial Lottery Corp. (ILC) has established a working group called the Innovators Network, comprised of innovation leads from all five Canadian jurisdictions. The goal is to accelerate revenue growth by broadening appeal through new games, channels, experiences and services for strategic player groups. The group does this by openly sharing its projects with each other, and also collaborating when it make sense.
“One of the things we noticed when we started customer innovation is that we have [overlapping concepts with other Canadian lotteries.] So we decided to start sharing,” said Mike Sandalis, Innovation Execution & Outpost Lab Lead, ALC. “And as that progressed and we started talking to other lotteries, and it was kind of informal—lets get into a room and start sharing stuff. We were all learning about design think at the same time. It was an area to practice that. It ended up becoming a bit successful and energizing to understand that other people have problems and they have different areas of expertise that you can leverage.”