As a technology company in a fast-paced industry, innovation must be at the heart of how we provide the best solutions to our customers. However, innovation doesn’t appear out of thin air. It takes brainstorming, good ideas, and even bad ones, to arrive at that innovative solution.
What sets regular solutions apart from great innovative solutions are their usefulness to the industry we are serving. In order to grasp just how important innovation is, we decided to put it into practice.
During the ALK Kickoff, Michael Kornhauser, ALK’s Executive Vice President & General Manager, showed us how innovation was especially important for companies like ALK. We work within the very competitive industry of transportation technology so it’s important that everyone at ALK understands the gravity of being innovative. To get every person from every department involved at ALK, we decided to make innovation part of the kickoff, literally!
We split the company up into 16 Innovation Lab teams and gave them topics that are both relative to our industry needs and our company as a whole. Topics included crowdsourcing, driver safety, mentoring programs at ALK, and autonomous vehicles, to name a few.
Each team was given 90 minutes, a topic definition, and tons of helpful material and got right to work!
After listing countless points, crossing them off, brainstorming on post-it notes, and snacking on some candy, our ALKers submitted some great ideas.
All ideas are now being reviewed by our Innovation Committee, which includes employees nominated from various departments for their passion for innovation. Three teams will be selected to present their ideas but only one will be chosen, and who knows, maybe it will be ALKs “next big thing”!