What Hospitality Innovation Really Looks Like on a Small Island

After returning from his MSc in Financial Technology from the University of Liverpool, and with a background spanning fintech, AI, iGaming, esports, and digital strategy, Massimo Formby is a product-focused founder with a passion for building from the ground up.

As Co-Founder of MaestroAI and Business Development Lead at Dazzler.app, a local discovery and online ordering platform, his focus lies in user experience, data-led experimentation, and sustainable go-to-market execution.

Drawing on first-hand experience building technology for the hospitality sector, he takes a practical, iterative approach to innovation. In this piece, Massimo shares reflections on launching two start-ups from the Isle of Man and why he believes the Island could offer fertile ground for the next generation of digital businesses.

Innovation is one of those words that gets thrown around until it starts to lose its meaning. In most cases, it’s used to sell a product, push a trend, or imply some Silicon Valley-fuelled transformation is just around the corner. But on the Isle of Man, or any small regional location, the world of hospitality and small business innovation isn’t a keynote speech or a glossy pilot programme.

It’s smaller than that, takes longer, and is driven above all by a shift in sentiment, norms, and values. Furthermore, to accurately describe what kind of innovation we are talking about, it’s important to distinguish the differences between incremental or process innovation, and radical innovation.

Sometimes innovation means refining how things are done (process/incremental innovation). Process innovation may be a restaurant owner who works seven days a week deciding whether they can try something new without alienating their regulars. It’s a front-of-house team deciding whether a QR code will speed things up or just confuse people. It’s knowing that a feature is technically sound, but culturally wrong.

However, these series of small, interconnected process-based innovations form the path for something to completely rewrite the rules of how something is achieved or done.

That’s radical innovation. Radical innovation in this context can be thought of as a governance system that changes the way people engage and spend with hospitality all together across all verticals; retention, acquisition, suppliers procurement, purchasing at point of sale, and many more.

Often infrastructure, which in this case can be incrementally improving processes across a firms value chain, lay the groundwork for the application that is radical in nature and outcome.

People Innovate Every Day We Just Don’t Call It That:

What gets called “innovation” in a corporate boardroom or a YC Combinator pitch is just normal problem-solving on the ground.

From our catalogue of primary data, it appears the most discussed problems within hospitality are:

1. Cost
2. Footfall
3. Visibility of business, offerings, and deals,

Across the 500 or so conversations face to face with business owners and customers in the last 3 year’s, merchants naturally have had to innovate their processes on their own. We’ve seen merchants who’ve figured out their own peak-hour batching systems. We’ve worked with businesses that’ve hacked WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to manage orders. We’ve also seen changes in the way they are trying to interact or retain their customers or acquire new customers, subscriptions, content, and even seagull policies.

These are not edge cases, they're the norm. But because these efforts are informal, iterative, and unbranded, they’re not labelled as innovative.

And that’s part of the problem. We’ve taught ourselves to only see innovation when it’s digital, disruptive, and data-backed (guilty). But often the biggest breakthroughs in hospitality aren’t technological, they're human. A tweak in process. A trust-building gesture. A change in rhythm. Something a little new here and there.

What the Data Told Us About Corporate Spend:

Recently, we surveyed local hospitality businesses on corporate ordering among other user questionnaires. The results were telling, and what stuck out was the experiences of merchants constantly being asked by corporates about discounts for all their staff to bring business their way.

Most businesses do receive corporate orders but informally. Walk-ins. Facebook DMs. No consistency, no tracking, no simple way to know if these clients are profitable or not. Few merchants actively pursue corporate demand, even though many say they’d like to grow it.

Why? Because the process is fragmented. Some get paid via bank card, others by invoice. Some never get repeat orders. Most can’t track the volume, let alone the value of this trade. Despite this, financial modelling reveals a corporate spending on hospitality of just above 8 figures.

This is a classic case of underleveraged demand. The appetite exists, but there’s no infrastructure to absorb it. And that’s where process innovation becomes useful: when it meets an existing behaviour and enhances it, rather than replacing it. Radical innovation in this sense would be the greater macro enhancement to the industry, with corporate spending on hospitality being a vertical to re-align within this.

Are you looking to attract more corporate orders?

Study: Research Questionnaire - Corporate Spending from a Merchant's Perspective

Disruption Isn’t the Goal, Absorption Is:

There’s a well-known academic term, absorptive capacity, which means an organisation’s ability to understand, adopt and act on new ideas. It’s one of the most underappreciated parts of innovation as a school of thought.

A new idea means nothing if it can’t be absorbed by economic actors within an environment.

And in the Isle of Man’s hospitality ecosystem, this rings especially true. Trust, routine, reputation, these things are hard-earned, easily disturbed, and very easily lost. There’s no room for flashy innovation that burns social capital in the name of speed or monetisation.

That’s why the approach we took with Dazzler has always been shaped by incremental innovation, the kind that adapts to a merchant’s pace and priorities. Because if you’re asking someone to change how they serve customers, it better feel like an upgrade, not a risk.

Where Innovation Goes from Here

So, what’s next?

For me, the future of innovation on the Isle of Man won’t come from copying playbooks from bigger markets. It will come from building systems that fit our own way of doing things, local-first-thinking, trust-based, time-poor, but ambition-rich.

This approach is one that naturally finds itself within the boundaries of ‘Economic Anthropology’ which looks at the theories behind exchange, from the point of view of the culture it is being researched, tested, of validated within. Now what does that actually mean?

It means that the precursor to process innovation, and therefore radical innovation, is to understand the norms, behaviours, and values of the people within the process to begin with. How do they already do things? What do they like about it? What do they not like about it?

Local tech, local values, and local systems of exchange that incentivise more socially desirable outcomes by correcting market misalignments. We don’t need to chase trends. We just need to keep listening, keep testing, and keep finding ways to make small improvements that add up to big changes. Because on a small island, that’s how innovation really works.