Case Study: Liberty Global achieves an enterprise-wide, sustainable innovation program with HYPE Innovation

Liberty Global Creating a Sustainable Innovation Program

Liberty Global, one of the world’s largest international cable companies (brands include Virgin Media, Telenet and UPC; revenues $11.4B, millions of customers), faced a common scaling problem: local innovation efforts ran in silos, ideas were unfocused or unowned, and basic tools prevented cross‑brand collaboration and alignment with corporate strategy. The company needed a single, enterprise-wide approach to harvest, prioritize and implement ideas that address real business challenges.

Liberty Global relaunched its Spark program on the HYPE platform, organizing innovation around Strategic Innovation Areas with sponsor-led, time‑limited campaigns, channels, local facilitators and offline initiatives (Matchbox, design‑thinking workshops). The centralized hub enabled cross-functional sharing and tracked ideas end-to-end. By 2018 Spark reached ~27,000 employees, generated ~16,000 ideas with more than 1,100 implemented and a realized ROI of nearly €18 million — including one idea scaled globally with a potential €30 million/year impact.

Liberty Global

Roel de Vries

Innovation Program Manager