Concrete innovation to create value
"Our innovation is based on a distinctive and concrete approach, and it is designed to support our stakeholders."
SEA considers innovation as a strategic competitive factor directly linked to stakeholders' needs, focused on continuous improvement of services and processes, and shaped by a measurable and tangible approach.
This continuous and incremental innovation is subject to a constant monitoring process to measure and quantify its impact.
Working together to innovate
"Innovation at SEA is a teamwork effort involving all departments and all employees across the organization in terms of contribution and generated impact."
Only a culture based on cross-functional teamwork can foster a working environment that values and encourages innovation. We firmly believe that through exchange of ideas, creativity, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, we can contribute to the development of new ideas and solutions to meet long-term business needs.
We have started an open and cross-functional innovation process based on the exchange of ideas and resources between different actors, both inside and outside the company. This model welcomes and enhances contributions from a wide range of sources, customers, passengers, start-ups, academic institutions, suppliers, commercial and industrial partners.
To this end, we created the Innovation Farm: a team of colleagues with the mission of strengthening our innovation network. It includes colleagues from all departments who are involved in innovative projects and work together to concretely implement them.
Listening to innovate
New mobility models and new high-tech frontiers are strongly and rapidly transforming the travel habits of all of us, bringing continuous opportunities for innovation which does not always mean only technology-based innovation.
It becomes essential for us to understand our stakeholders’ changing and evolving expectations, and to listen to their needs in terms of passenger experience, but also in terms of sustainability and process efficiency.
We invest a lot of time to actively listen to our stakeholders to better understand their needs. Every year, SEA runs a series of surveys, interviews and polls, both onsite and online, to identify emerging trends and preferences. We use this information to consistently tailor our actions to meet our people’s expectations and to provide concrete solutions that meet their needs.
Highlights
Innovation process
The innovation process at SEA is coordinated by the Innovation team, which is part of the Innovation, Quality & Continuous Improvement Department, reporting directly to the CEO.
The IQCI Department works together with all company departments and in particular with the HR, Infrastructure, IT, Maintenance, Planning and Control Department and the various business lines.
The Innovation Plan directly derives from the Group’s Strategic Plan, linking the innovation process to SEA’s strategy and objectives.
The Innovation team links with different internal and external stakeholders to gather needs and ideas.
Following the specific needs, the team takes action to search for possible solutions and proceeds with an initial screening of ideas, considering their relevance to the innovation plan, divided into 5 main themes:
- Passenger experience
- Environment
- Efficient operations
- Creation of new services and business initiatives
- Improvement of administrative and staff processes
This stage starts with the selection of ideas that have successfully passed the preliminary screening stage.
The Innovation Team then proceeds with the actual planning: a business case is developed for each idea. If it confirms the initiative viability, the project can follow two different approaches, depending on the nature of the need and the solution technological maturity:
- full deployment
- implementation of a Proof of Concept (PoC) of different duration and magnitude for each project with the purpose of gathering further evaluation elements before eventually proceeding to full deployment.
Given the large number of active projects, it is crucial at this stage to use project management techniques to define the team and target KPIs for each project, as well as priority, also considering the budget and funds available.
At this stage, depending on the nature of the project, the Innovation Farm starts playing an active role by providing their technical expertise and help.
The project is then approved and implemented.
The Innovation Team also monitors the implementation stage to see if the expected benefits are delivered.
