Beyond simple collaboration, open innovation growing together

Junhyeok Oh of Hyundai Card responsible for weekly meeting prep at his team had to spend long hours in booking a meeting room on every Monday. He had to go to Meeting Room Reservation page and check every meeting room that has not been booked and then reserve a meeting room. Since recently, however, he was able to book a meeting room easily and quickly without going through the complicated process. That is due to the introduction of Kono, AI schedule management system. This is how it works. Open the email, designate meeting participants and write “Kono, please book a meeting room” and then press Send. Soon, Kono will find a meeting room available that is the closest with participants and make a reservation. If you write in the email “Kono, I have a meeting outside the company on September 24th”, the meeting schedule will be registered automatically in your calendar. If you enter information of participants, it will set the meeting date for you considering user’s behavior patterns and existing schedule.

Kono is an AI-enabled schedule management system developed by an IT start-up Konolabs.

This AI schedule management system is created by Konolabs, a start-up company. Hyundai Card started collaboration with Konolabs in February and introduced Kono to the intranet in August aiming at improving work management efficiency by applying services developed by a start-up company in a tailored manner for Hyundai Card work systems. “To improve work efficiency, it is important to reduce the number of meetings. But it is also important to reduce unnecessary procedures such as preparations for meeting” said Eun-ji Jang of Hyundai Card Corporate Culture Team responsible for managing Kono. “Generally, office workers spend an average of 4.3 hours per month on schedule management. But if we use Kono, we can reduce waste of time” she added.

Open innovation through which a company collaborates with an external party to scale up its business and improve internal capacity is beginning to take roots in the corporate world. Open Innovation is an old concept defined and promoted in the early 2000s by Henry Chesbrough, professor of Berkeley, US. But as Open Innovation is recently pointed out as one of key engines in the 4th industrial revolution, it has been put back on the radar. As more people got to learn that behind the success of Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. which turned themselves from a small start-up to a giant global company lies Open Innovation, the concept is gaining more attention than ever. Open Innovation is different from simple collaboration in a sense that it creates something totally new by sharing technologies or service capabilities among companies. As start-up businesses are becoming a new fashion worldwide, open innovation with promising start-ups is particularly underscored. In fact, many companies home and abroad are having branches in the countries where they already have global presence for better collaboration with start-ups and find the ones they can work with.

Open innovation is hailed as a new business model to lead the fourth industrial revolution as industrial boundaries are blurring and the importance of collaboration is more emphasized.

Hyundai Card also has introduced open innovation strategy and proactively leveraged it to advance its digital capabilities and expand its scope of business. It is particularly active in working with tenants of its co-working space business ‘Studio Black’. There are 90 start-ups in Studio Black. Hyundai Card does more than just providing the start-ups with office rental services. It shares its business know-how it has built so far to support their growth, find good start-ups and explore how to create synergy in the areas that Hyundai Card does business. Also, it hosts ‘demo day’ where start-ups are given with an opportunity to introduce their business to investors. If often accepts suggestions from the tenants who want to work with Hyundai Card and actually turns the suggestions into execution. In fact, its tenants such as Konolabs, Methinks, etc. started open innovation with Hyundai Card via the demo day. Hyundai Card also engages in continuous communication with the tenants and exchanges information about good candidates for open innovation.

The company is making efforts to increase its employees’ interest in open innovation. It has created open innovation channel on its global intranet ‘Global CUBE’ and shared information on start-ups which the company can work with for its business. An assistant manager in Co-Innovation Team Chaeyoung Lee said, “We currently have a pool of 500 start-ups and 25 open innovation projects are underway. We not only help our employees be connected to start-ups they are interested in, but also share our collaboration cases with all of our executives and employees.” Hyundai Card is interested in open innovation with start-ups overseas on top of the ones in Korea. It became the first Korean company to sign an MOU with a global accelerator Techstars in July. A Hyundai Card official mentioned, “We believe our investment in what open innovation might bring is equal to our investment in the future of Hyundai Card. We will accept new and creative ideas from outside of the company to innovate our organizations at Hyundai Card and at the same time we will try to enter into totally new business areas.”

A demo day held at Hyundai Card’s Studio Black on December 2018.

Hyundai Card leveraged open innovation in listening to what its customers had to say and doing research. It signed an MOU with Methinks, a company that developed a consumer research platform in January. Methinks has developed and owned a video interaction chat platform which is used for gathering and analyzing voice of the customer. This platform enables its client to conduct user survey or service test real time via online video chat aside from the already available phone calls, face-to-face survey or text-based survey. An assistant manager in CS Team Hyosik Shin said, “If you are on Methinks platform, you can see both the face of a customer and the screen of his or her smartphone at the same time. This allows us to conduct in-depth analysis by looking at facial expressions or behaviors of the customer who is using the service. We are now preparing to apply the Methinks platform to our actual work.”

Hyundai Card officially launched AI-ARS on April 4th which enabled by open innovation with different partners such as Hyundai Autoever, IBM, etc. over the year.

Open innovation also helped the company’s effort to resolve inconvenience cause to its customers due to long queue when they called its customer center. Almost everyone has the experience of wasting their precious lunch break waiting to be connected to a customer service center. It takes minutes to be connected to a representative and even after you are connected, a mistake of pushing a wrong button can bring you back to where you started. It drives anyone crazy. To resolve this sort of frustration that the customers face, Hyundai Card launched AI-enabled ARS (Automated Response System) in partnership with Hyundai Autoever and IBM in April. It first started the service in six areas (pre-payment, credit line inquiry, credit line adjustment, breakdown of billed amount, registration of new password, password change) which are identified as the most frequently selected by customers based on their ARS use patterns. As a result, customer service calls reaching 30,000 a month are now taken by AI representatives. An assistant manager in AI Service Team said, “If you use AI-ARS service at noon on weekdays when the number of calls usually peaks, you don’t have to wait and get the service. As our AI representatives have more experience, the quality of our service can be more improved.”

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