Kindred Futures is Kindred Group’s innovation arm, which launched in 2016 with the aspiration to connect with startups and early-stage businesses. Acting as a value-adding partner, Kindred Futures aims to form long-term mutually beneficial partnerships to explore strategically interesting opportunities arising from technological developments or customer trends.
Every partnership is tailored to needs, but we can offer our partners access to the internal expertise that comes from a 2,000-person business and industry leader. This could be legal and regulatory advice, customer insight, or data science and machine learning expertise. Partners will be able to grow their business by potentially gaining access to a customer base exceeding 1 million active customers across more than a hundred countries per month.
Kindred Futures operates primarily a needs-based exploration, focusing on the transformative side of innovation where ingenuity can create impact and tangible change. It is about increasing bandwidth to explore the less certain or less well understood propositions and technologies, and tapping into the creativity, energy, and expertise of startups to achieve this.
Ultimately, innovations should transform the customer experience, but this does not mean they have to be directly customer facing. It could be a new customer-facing interface for betting with one of our brands or the back-end tech systems that facilitate the experience. Startups could be from the gambling industry, parallel fields, or further afield.
This is a unique and exciting opportunity for entrepreneurs to bring new ideas to the table at a company that wants to go far beyond ‘just being a customer’. We may be small in number, but we are big on ambition. Get in touch via email or better still, come and meet us in person – in London, Stockholm, Malta or Gibraltar.
Looking into the future can be an exciting prospect, but it’s the application of today’s cutting-edge technologies within an organisation that drives lasting innovation. Since joining Kindred, it’s been my goal to demonstrate the power of working with the outside world by delivering real technology integrations that show measurable return on investment. I believe that growing a culture of innovation is best achieved by ‘doing’ and open innovation has the power to rapidly revolutionise both product and culture within any company. Finding that perfect fit technology and nurturing its integration into our core business is what Kindred Futures is all about. Before joining kindred, I spent over a decade leading Innovation teams and developing technology partnerships within the toy industry giants of Hasbro and Lego.
I’m interested in the potential that technology has to create richer, deeper and more personalised customer experiences. Here at Kindred Futures, we get to explore this with some of the smartest developers, start-ups and businesses to help create value for our customers. Before joining Kindred, I spent seven years working across partnerships, product marketing and launching conferences in emerging technology.
