What differentiates TUI Digital & Tech team from other Digital&Tech teams?

As always people and product make the difference. I can't talk so much about others, but in TUI we live and breath an open culture as well as we very much like our travel products. It's also the state-of-the-art technology and we always encourage teams to innovate. Not for the sake of innovation, but to create the best solutions for our customers.

Innovation is key to enterprise survival nowadays.
But how do you balance bringing the innovation your clients require (new apps, new technology) with the company budget and needed adaptation (it is a pain point in most places)?

I would see that two fold. One is to have a flexible (service-orientated) architecture with a brest-of-breed approach. That makes it easier to change modules without to much impact on other parts of the ecosystem. Second is that during the budget process innovation is always considered, just like non-functional requirements and long term maintenance.

So you keep innovation on your budget even though not knowing exactly what's to come? Very interesting...

We have even specific roles that focus only on innovation, however we see that always as team effort and want everyone to be part of innovations.