As part of its ongoing Digital Blueprint, Singapore Airlines launched its fourth AppChallenge last night at Block 71 in conjunction with NUS Enterprise, the innovation and entrepreneurship division of the National University of Singapore.
One of the challenges involves improving the Krisshop experience and extending it beyond the sales cart
A full house turned out to listen to what the dominant carrier in Singapore wanted to achieve with this latest initiative aimed at fishing for ideas and solutions to five specified pain points.
- Improving mobile app engagement: How can we create an innovative feature that leverages on mobile app digital trends that excite users, drives engagement and awareness and enhances the user experience throughout the travel journey?
- Offloaded Passenger Compensation Process: How can we improve the overall experience for offloaded passengers so that they would continue to fly with SIA, while also reducing the time and effort needed to effectively manage their compensation?
- Enabling the KrisShop Experience: How do we facilitate and manage the fulfillment process of e-commerce transactions to enable hassle-free check-in and collection of pre-ordered duty-free products such as a 42 inch LCD TV on arrival at baggage area?
- Tracking Inventory Usage: How can we track inventory of service ware and its usage to provide insights into usage patterns/demands and improve forecast accuracy?
- Tracking F&B Consumption: How can we track the amount of F&B wastage to help us collect data about passengers’ consumption patterns onboard more efficiently?
There are two categories – Students and Open. The grand prize for students is a round trip to Silicon Valley and in the open category, the reward is any SIA destination and $5,000.
In launching the challenge, Jerome Thil, VP Digital Innovation of Singapore Airlines, said the idea behind the programme was “to bring problems out into the ecosystem and have you help us reinvent, bring in solutions and ideas that might be core and adjacent and change the culture”.
Thil, who joined SIA in July, used to work for Sabre and Amadeus, and was the founder of Sprice, one of the earliest startups in travel search in Asia, before it was acquired by Travelport where he stayed for a stint.
He talked about creating “a place where people feel safe to take risks with innovative ideas” within the group. “If we can have 10-15% of employees join the journey, that’s when you trigger cultural change.”
Judging criteria would be 30% technical competency, 20% innovation, 40% business value and 10% UX.
Submissions are due September 30 and October 27 will be the Final Pitch.
