Formerly known as Sime Darby Plantation, SD Guthrie came to Labbrand at an important moment in its transformation. Following an internal restructuring that consolidated innovation efforts under larger programmes, the company had stronger coordination and greater visibility across initiatives — but also a more urgent need to define what innovation should mean in practice, where the real gaps were, and how to prioritise action across a large, complex organisation.
For a business of this scale, the challenge was not a lack of activity. Innovation was already happening across R&D, operations, digital, sustainability, and commercial teams. The real question was how to make sense of it all: how to benchmark current practices, identify the blockers holding the system back, and build a roadmap that could guide both short-term improvements and longer-term transformation.
SD Guthrie needed a more grounded view of where it truly stood. That meant not just comparing itself against peers, but understanding the underlying conditions that shape innovation performance: structure, culture, process, metrics, governance, and the ability to move ideas from problem definition to validation, scaling, and outcomes. Labbrand’s role was to help define innovation success, measure it in a way that felt relevant to the business, and translate findings into practical priorities and a usable roadmap.
One of the most important realities we uncovered was that many of the obstacles were systemic, not individual. Structural tensions, resource constraints, cultural friction, recognition gaps, and fear of failure were all shaping how innovation was experienced internally. At the same time, there was also real openness, strong leadership intent, and clear momentum to build on.
Labbrand designed a multi-phase innovation benchmarking programme that combined internal audit, stakeholder interviews, survey research, external expert interviews, and best-practice benchmarking across plantation players and cross-industry innovators. The objective was to build a balanced picture: one that reflected internal realities, external standards, and the practical trade-offs of innovation inside a major agribusiness organisation.
Our analysis was anchored in a 10-category innovation scorecard spanning the full journey from strategy, culture, and infrastructure through to insights, problem definition, solution development, validation, scaling, and outcomes. In total, this framework covered 60 innovation themes, giving SD Guthrie a more structured and repeatable way to understand strengths, weaknesses, and maturity gaps.
The work itself was intentionally designed to move beyond abstract benchmarking. We spoke with 21 leaders across R&D, Innovation Projects and Group functions, gathered internal survey feedback from internal employees, and triangulated this against best practices and expert input to identify the patterns that mattered most.
What made this engagement especially valuable was that the insights were not left sitting in a report. They were brought into the room.
Suring our Innovation Strategic Workshop, 25 R&D leaders came together for a full-day session to engage directly with the findings, walk through the evidence, reflect on tensions, and prioritise the most important gaps through impact-versus-feasibility discussions. That process helped turn benchmarking into alignment.
Several themes stood out clearly. One was the opportunity to create a more shared innovation language and clearer pathways across the organisation, helping teams align more easily around how ideas move forward. Another was the value of sharpening problem definition and user orientation earlier in the process, so innovation efforts could be better focused from the outset. A third was the importance of fostering a culture of learning, where experimentation, reflection, and iteration can happen more confidently over time.
These are the kinds of shifts that sound simple on paper, but in practice can reshape how innovation is prioritised, discussed, and managed across the organisation.
The impact of the project was clarity.
Labbrand helped SD Guthrie move from broad innovation ambition toward a more focused innovation agenda, grounded in clearer priorities, identified opportunity areas, and a phased roadmap for progress. This roadmap helped organise actions across the short, medium, and longer term, balancing immediate enablers with broader capability-building needed to support more sustained innovation over time.
Just as importantly, the work helped reframe innovation measurement itself. Rather than relying too heavily on activity or idea volume, the emerging direction was to focus more on value, validated learning, execution quality, and links back to corporate goals. That shift — from output to impact — is often where innovation benchmarking becomes truly useful.
For many large organisations, innovation does not fail because people lack ideas. It stalls because the system lacks alignment: alignment on what innovation means, what success looks like, where decisions sit, and what should be prioritised first.
This project showed how benchmarking can do more than compare. Done well, it can help a business see itself more clearly, create a common language across functions, and build the confidence to move from scattered effort to more deliberate innovation leadership.
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