ABOITIZ GROUP DEVOTES P39 MILLION FUND FOR EMPLOYEE-LED INNOVATION EXPERIMENTS

Central to the Aboitiz Group’s Great Transformation journey is building a future-ready, agile, and entrepreneurial organization. At the heart of that journey are team members ready to co-create and engage in innovation experiments to discover ways to improve the workplace, processes, products, and develop game-changing solutions and services to create value for the Group’s stakeholders.

In line with this, Aboitiz Group President and CEO Sabin M. Aboitiz approved a PHP39 million exploration and experimentation fund to support team members in jump-starting their own innovative ideas. Every Aboitiz team member is allotted a seed fund that they can use to work on projects individually or they can collaborate with others by pooling their funds together for a larger project.

The Aboitiz Group Chief hopes that the initiative will help team members inject the spirit of transformation into their day-to-day work. “Instilling innovation in Aboitiz is about discovery and experimentation in both our personal and professional lives. We have accelerated transformation across our business processes, decision-making methods, and collective way of thinking — inside and outside our job titles — to move us forward in our ambition to make Aboitiz a world-class innovator,” he said.

For the Aboitiz Group, empowering team members to conceptualize and implement new ideas is the path towards opening minds further in the organization, thereby pushing creativity in design and development regardless of scale or complexity. With or without the use of technology, the innovation experiments proposed by team members can pave the way for opportunities that enhance or add value to the Group in the short- or long-term.

Dr. Adrienne Heinrich, Innovation and Process Management Lead for Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc. (AEV), believes that innovative thinking is key to transforming and becoming more efficient, productive and ultimately, successful. “These experiments will help nurture the innovative spirit of the Great Transformation. There are a multitude of challenges that can be addressed through experimentation, and each team member is encouraged to apply an entrepreneurial mindset in selecting opportunities that will create larger value, impact, and advantage if successful. Do not be afraid of failure. When we fail, we learn, and when we learn, we succeed,” Dr. Heinrich said.

Through the program, the Aboitiz Group looks to foster an environment where transformative exploration, collaboration, and idea-sharing thrive. In turn, successful projects and ideas are expected to bring business value, improving the Group’s products and services to all of its customers and stakeholders. #