Innovation takes root when everyone is encouraged to spot opportunities, named teams are accountable for testing them and proven changes are handed into the everyday business.
AM explores how Athenea Automotive Group, Steven Eagell Group and Autotrader are turning that chain of responsibility into practical results as part of Innovation Week 2026.
The flash of inspiration is the seductive part of innovation. It is also the easy part. Inside a dealership, a sales executive notices where an enquiry slips away, a service adviser sees an opportunity in a workshop visit or a manager questions a report. What matters is what happens next.
If ideas can come only from the boardroom, the people closest to customers and operational friction are silenced. If nobody clearly owns the experiment, even a promising suggestion is swamped by the day job. If a successful pilot remains the property of a transformation team, it never becomes how the business works.
Innovation becomes cultural only when that chain is complete: responsibility for generating ideas is broad, responsibility for testing them is clear and responsibility for embedding them passes into everyday operations.
Across Athenea Automotive Group, Steven Eagell Group and Autotrader, the mechanisms differ. The common thread is permission, ownership and follow-through.
Give everyone permission to notice
Athenea, formed through the merger of Johnsons Cars and Brayleys Cars, has almost 2,000 employees across 79 franchised car and van dealerships.
Andrew Burn, deputy chief executive officer at Athenea, says opening innovation to the workforce requires both psychological safety and a dependable route through which ideas can travel. He warns that while frontline insight is abundant it can become trapped within departments or locations.
“Innovation becomes everyone’s responsibility when people have both the confidence and the opportunity to contribute,” he says. “We are working hard to create an environment where colleagues feel comfortable speaking up, sharing ideas and challenging the status quo, regardless of their role or level within the organisation.”
Athenea invites suggestions and concerns through regular business communications while cross-functional workshops bring together different perspectives. The executive committee assesses proposals against strategic alignment, potential impact, feasibility and return on investment.
Democratising ideas does not mean allowing every dealership to improvise its own answer, however, and Burn warns that, without a framework, enthusiasm can create multiple versions of one process and introduce fresh inconsistency.
The subjects raised are not confined to technology or profit. Frontline contributions helped shape Athenea’s decision to become a Foster Friendly employer and employees helped choose Macmillan Cancer Support as its charity partner. Innovation also concerns the actual workplace people experience.
Steven Eagell Group meanwhile has created its own listening rhythm for more than 1,500 colleagues across 43 Toyota and Lexus dealerships. Twice-yearly online town halls allow employees to submit questions, criticism and ideas anonymously. Leaders respond during the sessions and ask for further feedback afterwards, group operations director Sheraz Rashid explains.
“The purpose of the town halls is to create a more open and transparent dialogue across the whole business,” he says. “We invite colleagues to share feedback and ideas in advance, which means we can listen and respond to what matters most. We then use those insights to help shape our future strategy.”
At general manager meetings, the group sharpens that conversation by asking leaders what they would “love to have”, “fight to keep” and be “keen to lose”. The last question gives employees explicit permission to challenge accumulated complexity.
“It is very easy to get carried away and keep introducing new initiatives or obstacles,” Rashid says, agreeing with Athenea’s Burn. “Sometimes business is best kept simple. When colleagues tell us what they are keen to lose, there are occasions when we sit back and think, ‘Why did we do this in the first place?’”
That is not resistance to innovation. It is innovation doing one of its most valuable jobs: removing activity that no longer earns its place.
Make the experiment someone’s job
Once an idea has been heard, someone must be answerable for converting it into a test with a defined problem and measures.
Steven Eagell has created a general manager for transformation and talent role, responsible for the colleague journey and bringing fragmented processes into a consistent group-wide structure. Rashid says it has already improved efficiency, onboarding and consistency.
Named ownership prevents change being shuttled between busy managers. Yet the specialist’s purpose is not to build a permanent innovation enclave. It is to create something operational teams can inherit.
The group’s smart repair project shows that movement from opportunity to controlled experiment. Around 60% of vehicles arriving for servicing have some cosmetic damage, Rashid estimates, which has led to facilities being installed alongside aftersales at Oxford and Birmingham.
“We want to be a one-stop shop for our customers,” he says. “The customer can have the car serviced and, at the same time, have a dent or scuff repaired. It provides a better service and creates an alternative revenue stream.”
The dealerships will allow the group to examine demand, pricing, workflow and returns before wider expansion. A pilot is not a smaller roll-out but the stage at which assumptions can still be challenged.
Athenea similarly uses pilot dealerships, departments and internal champions when an initiative warrants it. Burn says these trials reveal “what works well, what needs refining and how colleagues and customers respond”, allowing change to be introduced more confidently.
Clear ownership also makes it safer for a test to disappoint. A measured experiment can produce useful evidence even when it does not perform as anticipated.
“Not every initiative will deliver the results we expect, but that doesn’t equate to failure,” Burn says. “Often, the greatest learning comes from understanding why something didn’t work and using those insights to improve our approach.”
Hand change to the business
Autotrader’s performance team provides a revealing view of the final transfer. Led by Bex Kennet, head of new car performance, it helps franchised dealers improve how they manage, advertise and sell new vehicle stock across tangled systems and dispersed teams.
The unit began around seven years ago as a task force helping dealers transfer vehicle data onto the platform. Its remit has expanded as products, competition and consumer choice have developed.
Its performance managers are not commission based and can work with an account for up to two years, recognising that innovation often requires patient unpicking before improvement.
“Initially, it is about asking what is going on with the retailer’s new cars,” Kennet says. “Where do they sit? Who is responsible for them? What are the goals and how are we going to get there together? We agree what we can do, what the retailer needs to do and who is responsible for each part.”
Workshops may lead to weekly calls, dealership visits, webinars and training. Senior leaders can open the door, but dealership teams and manufacturers must eventually make the altered process work without the task force beside them.
One dealer group asked why EV performance varied across its network. The underlying problem was not simply selling technique but allocation: some dealerships held large numbers of electric cars while others had none.
“That request came from the retailer,” Kennett says. “It wanted to understand why one site was working and another was not. We were able to help it look more deeply at the mix of vehicles across the group and where the opportunities lay.”
The example captures the cultural chain. A dealership raises the question, a specialist team diagnoses the response, then the dealer’s people absorb the answer into actionnable decisions.
Fresh thinking from outside
Autotrader applies a similar principle internally. Kennett says that while automotive experience brings operational understanding, recruits from other sectors question the habits insiders may no longer see. Improvements have ranged from automating pricing reports to using analytics differently.
“Innovation does not always have to be something groundbreaking and shiny,” she says. “The question we are trying to answer is: how can we help retailers make more money? Anything that makes them more effective can come from many different ideas.”
Curiosity starts that process, but Kennett says tenacity carries it through an industry dependent on long-established systems. A business must remain interested after the workshop, the pilot and the first encouraging result.
Steven Eagell’s dedicated lost sales team illustrates how measurement maintains attention. It revisits enquiries marked as lost, with early analysis suggesting about 55% of those customers may still be in the market. Across 220,000 opportunities, a one percentage point conversion improvement could produce more than 2,000 additional sales a year.
Measurement also supports its employment changes. After Steven Eagell shortened weekday sales opening, improved leave and guaranteed new recruits at least £30,000 in their first year, staff attrition improved by 7% year on year. Toyota’s employee survey drew a 91% response rate and delivered the group’s strongest results to date.
These are innovations not because they are technologically novel but because the business questioned a familiar practice, assigned responsibility for changing it and checked what happened.
Ideas still matter. But the real evidence of an innovation culture is not the volume collected in a suggestion scheme or the excitement surrounding a pilot. It is the moment the originator no longer needs to champion the change, the project team can step away and colleagues adopt the new approach as the way the business works better.
Across all five days, AM Innovation Week will be providing a practical guide to the technology, processes and ideas capable of producing genuine results.
AM Innovation Week runs from September 21 to 25, 2026, with the ‘Identifying the innovations that count’ webinar taking place at 2pm on Thursday, September 24. Reserve your place now!
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