Royal Bank of Scotland chief Simon McNamara says 2016 will be the year when "innovation moves out of a basement and into the heart of RBS", as the Scottish bank opens a new 'Open Experience Centre' at its Edinburgh HQ building.
The move from the bank's former technology solutions centre in Fettes Row to the recently refurbished Gogarburn offices, will put the bank's tech staff side-by-side with a new 'Entrepreneurial Centre', housing up to 100 entrepreneurs and ten startup support organisations, enabling staff to soak up the startup atmosphere first hand.
"Open Experience is a place where we will work differently. It will be our centre for open innovation, a new way of working now being adopted by some of the most forward-thinking companies in the world," says McNamara. "Open innovation means bringing start-ups and other partners from outside the bank to feed into what we do to capture the smartest ideas."
He says the bank has set up a network of global scouting teams who visited nearly 1000 companies last year across a network spanning the UK, Israel and Silicon Valley.
At Gogarburn, he says "we’ll work in multidisciplinary cells, in 8 - 10 week sprints to take the opportunities from our scouts, turn them into concepts and test them in labs with our customers to refine and develop them into great experiences".