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Sodexo (A): Assembling the Ingredients f...

Markou, Panos, Hut...

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Sodexo (A): Assembling the Ingredients for Innovation

Markou, Panos; Hutchison-Krupat, Jeremy; Klopfenstein, Amy

OM-1827 | Published July 21, 2025 | 15 Pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

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Sodexo, a global food services and hospitality company, faces challenges in scaling and adopting innovations across its diverse business units. Neta Meir, the recently appointed senior vice president of Group Innovation, is tasked with identifying ways to better align the company’s robust innovation pipeline with its operational units to ensure broader adoption and impact. Although Sodexo boasts a strong history of partnering with start-ups and implementing innovation initiatives, it struggles to convert pilot programs and promising technologies into scalable, integrated solutions. This A case invites open-ended discussion about how Meir might improve the innovation efforts at the company. It allows for comparison between internal and open innovation, as well as assessment of the relative merits of accelerators, contests, and venture capital, and it challenges students to think critically about the scalability of innovation, the role of leadership and stakeholder management in integration, and the challenges in getting innovations adopted in a complex, multinational organization. The B case provides an epilogue. Both cases include videos shot with the case protagonists. At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, this case set is taught in a second-year MBA elective “Managing Innovation,” often with another case, “Global Innovation at L Marks” (UVA-OM-1826), which focuses on internal innovation in a global company. It could also be used in a module on comparing and contrasting internal and open innovation initiatives. The case set is also suitable for Executive MBA and Executive Education audiences, particularly those with experience in innovation management and corporate strategy, and for courses in new product development, corporate strategy, or global operations.

Through the case discussion, students should do the following: (1) Understand the interplay, benefits, and challenges of internal and open innovation models, and explore how organizations can leverage internal programs to empower employees and foster bottom-up innovation while simultaneously engaging with external ecosystems to source disruptive technologies and solutions. (2) Evaluate and compare different innovation programs—accelerators, contests, and corporate venture capital—to understand their strengths, limitations, and use cases. (3) Analyze the inherent tensions between corporate innovation functions and business units, and explore how these tensions affect innovation success. Students will discuss strategies for moving innovations from pilot programs to full-scale deployment and achieving measurable impact, and the challenges that a lack of accountability poses. They will further understand how buy-in from the various business units and stakeholders can be obtained, and they will learn to diagnose why “typical” corporate accelerators fail. (4) Examine the dynamics of push versus pull innovation in a global context. Students will compare top-down (push) and bottom-up (pull) innovation approaches, evaluating their respective roles and challenges in a multinational organization.