What does Adaptive Edge do?

Adaptive Edge is a UK strategy and innovation consultancy. We help organisations decide what to change, then make the change real: strategy built with the people who must carry it, AI adoption inside real work, and behaviour change that sticks.

How is Adaptive Edge different from a traditional strategy consultancy?

We do not hand over a deck and leave. Strategy is made in working sessions with your own teams, so the people who must deliver it own it from day one. We prove an approach in one team before asking the whole organisation to change.

Who does Adaptive Edge work with?

Global organisations across healthcare, industrials, media, retail technology and financial services, including ITAB Group, Freudenberg, Sky and Sandvik Coromant. Engagements run across Europe and beyond, remote and on site.

How does Adaptive Edge approach AI adoption?

We put AI to work inside real workflows rather than running abstract training. Teams learn on their own live work, we measure what actually changes, and we scale only what proves useful.

What does a typical engagement look like?

Most engagements combine focused research, co-created working sessions, and hands-on tools built for your context. They range from a single workshop to a multi-phase transformation programme.

How do we start a conversation?

Use the contact form on the site. We usually begin with a short call to understand the decision you are facing, and we will tell you plainly if we are not the right fit.

ITAB Group: Seven Years from Strategy to Reinvention

Client: ITAB Group

The Challenge

How does a global retail solutions group set a bold new direction, make it real across its portfolios and commercial teams, and then renew its strategy when a merger transforms the organisation?

Our Approach

The partnership began in 2019, before the pandemic, when ITAB needed a new strategic direction for a changing retail landscape. We helped facilitate a strategy process that repositioned the business from product supplier towards solutions provider, a shift that would reshape what the company sold, how it sold, and the capabilities it needed.

Strategy was only the start. Over the following years we helped ITAB realise four of the strategic priorities that came out of that work. A solution design programme used customer research, prototyping and service blueprints to build the organisation's ability to sell outcomes rather than products. Two portfolio programmes defined ITAB's future retail technology portfolio and services portfolio, taken through multi-workshop processes to board level. A commercial excellence workstream helped the sales organisation develop the consultative skills the new strategy demanded.

Then, in 2025, ITAB merged with HMY, and the newly combined group needed more than integration planning. We designed and facilitated a design thinking-led strategy process that put consumer and retailer insight at the heart of every decision: in-depth consumer interviews across six European markets, conversations with senior leaders at major retailers, and three collaborative workshops with the extended leadership team over six months. Bespoke AI-driven tools enabled anonymous input, real-time synthesis and transparent voting, so every voice shaped the outcome. Between sessions we worked intensively with a senior core team to refine raw workshop outputs into a coherent strategic narrative for board-level decision-making.

Throughout, the answers came from the room. Our job was to bring the outside world in through consumer and retailer evidence, and to design a process where the leadership team could work through the choices themselves. Every strategic element could be traced back to participant input. Nothing was imposed.

The Impact

Seven years, a repositioning and a merger, and the strategy is still moving.

ITAB Group emerged with a unified Strategy 2030 and a clear vision: to be recognised as a trusted partner that makes life easier for customers, reducing complexity, creating cost efficiency, and bridging the experience between online and physical shopping. The strategy defined seven prioritised strategic initiatives with visible collective ownership, and the "Better Together" positioning moved from tagline to operating principle.

All seven priority areas from the 2019 strategy were funded and approved by the board, and we went on to help realise four of them: solution design, the technology portfolio, the services portfolio and commercial excellence. Because the strategy had been carried through into delivered programmes, new portfolios, new service offers and new commercial capability, the leadership team trusted the process to do more than produce a document. Follow-on leadership events took the new strategy to the wider organisation, and the research, frameworks and workshop outputs now support rollout across market business units.

Our Role

Nathan led the facilitation and design of the work across the arc: the original strategy process, the solution design, portfolio and commercial excellence programmes that realised it, and the post-merger Strategy 2030 process, including the AI-enabled synthesis and voting tools used in the workshops.