The first thing I reached out for in the cabin was the champagne. Even though it wasn’t real, it felt like the thing to do when one is flying in a space that’s decked out to look more like a Japanese onsen with soft steam billowing all around than the kind of prosaic cabin I am more used to.
I am at KrisLab, the Singapore Airlines’ “playroom” (my term), where I am trying out the Virtual Reality (VR) experience in which designers get to experiment and create the next big thing in product.
I guess this is as close as I will ever get to this first class cabin of the future. With my VR headset on – when will these sets stop being so clunky – I can touch the wood of the bar and the fabric of the seats.
KrisLab was set up by Singapore Airlines earlier this year as a collaborative workplace to encourage its employees to innovate as well as for the airline to work with startups, accelerators and other industry partners. Located within the Changi Sports Club, it’s open and easily accessible (without having to go through the stringent security checks in other buildings in this vicinity) and clearly it must be working because the space is being expanded as I write this.
So far, staff have contributed up to 500 ideas, out of which 60 have been developed into working prototypes and 11 are in production, said Jerome Thil, vice president, digital innovation. About half of the ideas are customer-facing while the other half are related to operations.
In fact, KrisPay, the digital wallet hat allows Krisflyer members to use “mobile miles for everyday spend”, came out of KrisLab and was rolled out in six months of a staff introducing the idea.
Other than credit, staff do not get monetary incentives for contributing ideas “unless the ideas are monetised in which case, we will discuss on a case by case basis”, said Thil. “The idea behind KrisLab is to encourage everyone to contribute and to be aware that innovation or creativity does not sit within one division or with one person – that it’s everywhere.”
Another idea being worked on is an AR (Augmented Reality) colouring game for kids although there’s no reason why adults wouldn’t love this as well.
Other than a place for staff to contribute ideas, there’s also an area dedicated to innovation in operations – for example, cabin design using AR and VR tools as well as the running of design thinking workshops.
External-facing initiatives include the SIA App Challenge, now in its fourth year, currently accepting submissions. Last year’s App Challenge produced one graduate – F5shift – which addresses the problem of food wastage on flights. The product is being tested currently in real-life situations, said Thil.
It also runs a 10-week accelerator programme in partnership with NUS Enterprise. The first session, which started in January this year, saw five startups graduate – airfree, F5Shift, Migacore, Traversel and Volantio – solving problems from the tracking of onboard food wastage, seamless integration of offline and online retail for a better inflight shopping experience as well as optimisation of seat capacity and revenue maximisation.
“Each of these solved a pain point for the airline,” said Thil. Again, no monetary investment is guaranteed in the programme. “People don’t join our programme for monetary reasons.”
However he does not dismiss the possibility of SIA investing in certain startups “if there is a connection and empathy on both sides”, he said.
Thil, who worked for Sabre prior to joining SIA, and who was one of the co-founders behind Sprice, one of the earlier meta-search startups in Asia, observed that the possibility of disintermediation in airline distribution was still very much in the air.
“Will the GDS, as we know it, still be here in the next 10 years? It’s pretty inevitable that distribution landscapes will change with the emergence of blockchain that has real promise of being the new distribution without the middlemen. I know we’ve been saying this about GDS for many years but it could become more real in the next decade,” said Thil.
The other big change is the rise of messaging as a powerful medium. “How many apps do we want on our phone? The power of messaging is it has the ability to reach you at the right place at the right time. For example, if you are in a taxi, the airline should be able to tell you what gate you are at. Travel is a flow, and messaging stays with you within that flow. I believe probably messaging platforms will win.”
