376: Ocado CTO Paul Clarke has guided the company to differentiate itself by focusing not on how fast they can innovate, but on how fast they can innovate their system for innovation. Paul discusses the broad and deep technology estate that has enabled Ocado’s online grocery business to operate with scale, sustainability, and profitability. Through a focused but balanced approach to innovation, the company has developed a unique end-to-end operating solution for online grocery retail that includes massive automated warehouses and an e-commerce, fulfillment, and logistics platform. In a strategy that resembles Amazon’s AWS, Ocado is now making its technology available to other retailers through the B2B-focused Ocado Solutions arm. We also discuss Ocado’s roadmap for a frictionless customer experience, the advantages of its business model, its culture of disruptive innovation, among other topics.
Paul is the Chief Technology Officer of Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer. In this role, Paul heads up Ocado Technology, whose 950+ engineers develop the cutting-edge technology that power Ocado’s operations and the Ocado Smart Platform. Given its vision of “powering the future of retail through sustained disruptive technology innovation,” Paul has guided Ocado to differentiate itself by focusing not on how fast they can innovate, but on how fast they can innovate their system for innovation. Before becoming CTO, Paul was Head of Routing, Simulations, Mobile, and Robotics. Paul has a Masters of Arts in Psychics from the University of Oxford.
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