How Swae Helped Etihad Airways Drive Global Innovation Discovery and Continuous Improvement Across 27 Countries

Swae helps Etihad Airways generate 10x deeper employee engagement and get a 360% improvement in the number of brilliant ideas generated as compared to in-house innovation processes.

Use Case: Employee Innovation

Company: Etihad Airways

See the infographic below, or for more information, you can also download the full case study (the link is below).

Brief Overview

Etihad Airways is the second-largest airline and the flag carrier of the UAE (after Emirates) with their home base in Abu Dhabi.

Etihad Airways was spending an enormous amount of already-scarce senior management time using manual ideation processes that left employees feeling open to potential criticism and unmotivated resulting in low engagement.

Problem

Etihad Airways was managing the company-wide employee innovation in an unscalable and inefficient manner to try to turn ideas into decisions, resulting in poor results and outcomes.

Etihad Airways’ superhuman two-member innovation team manually consolidated a series of tools — from suggestion boxes and forms to Yammer chat rooms and boards, and surveys — to design the company-wide innovation process for turning employee insights and ideas into investable decisions.

This in-house process did not allow ideas from other team members or employees across the organization to add their insights or scrutinize the proposals.

The best ideas were presented at a meeting to determine their fate. In the lead-up, the innovation team would coach the proposal owners on how to turn their proposal into a compelling 5-minute business pitch.

The process, while highly valuable to those who had their proposals move through the process, used an enormous amount of already-scarce senior management time in an inefficient way.

Senior leadership realized that this manual, high-touch system, and processes seriously impeding the organization’s ability to innovate at a faster rate and leverage powerful insight from the entire employee base.

Etihad Airways needed a faster and more effective way to leverage knowledge from all employees.

Solution

Together, we created a new bottom-up ideation process for Etihad, supported by Swae’s core technology and collective intelligence and AI features to drive important innovation discovery, empower the voices of their employees, and improve products and service offerings across the company.

Integrating Swae’s platform internally supported an always-on, AI-powered, employee innovation, and engagement tool.

Infographic

“We worked with Swae to pilot iFikra, an internal ideation platform for Etihad employees, and the results have been encouraging. What started out as an idea platform has now evolved to be a driver of employee engagement, allowing us employees from different roles, grades, and locations to collaborate, share ideas, and have their voices heard.

It’s taught us that there are bright ideas waiting to be uncovered amongst our employees, and importantly, that they will share and engage if provided with the right platform to do so.”

Kai ling Ting, Senior Manager Strategy & Innovation, Digital and Innovation

Want all the details?

Read the full case study to learn all of the implications of the manual innovation processes, and how Swae helped Etihad Airways develop a powerful platform together. Download here.