AP Forms “Hybrid Dream Teams” under “ORIGINAL U” to Accelerate Innovation in All Level

AP (Thailand) Public Company Limited (AP), a leader in Thailand’s property industry is taking a solid step forward in its third decade on the main mission to EMPOWER LIVING. Standing ready for a world in transition, the company has made INNOVATION CULTURE a key driver of its operation in a new environment as it races to breed corporate innovators through “ORIGINAL U”, a special pilot project to accelerate innovation culture in people at all levels.

To make that happen, the firm is forming ‘hybrid dream teams’, bringing together people from different divisions, subsidiaries and partners to unlock the potential and creativity to jointly innovate in an effort to elevate project development standards, increase the efficiency of its work process while creating new living experiences and services that empower AP customers to live a good life on their own terms.

 

Mr. Anuphong Assavabhokhin, Chief Executive Officer of AP, said, “Our teams are the ones who know and understand customers best, especially during a time of recurring turmoil, with fresh competitive challenges and irreversible way of living. To ensure that we step forward into the 30th year sustainably on our great mission to EMPOWER LIVING, we won’t stop building our strength from within and the strategy of INNOVATION CULTURE will be a major mechanism to create a new work culture to drive innovation for people at all levels. We have piloted a special project called ‘ORIGINAL U’ to breed corporate innovators through hybrid dream teams where people from different divisions, subsidiaries and business partners are brought together to unlock the potential and creativity needed to innovate together to ensure we have a solid footing in the world of change as we seek business opportunities in the new environment.”

 

The special pilot project ORIGINAL U is part of the effort to create an innovation culture in people at all levels of the organisation to make AP team members dare to question and keep thinking out of the box in line with the Design Thinking principle in the belief that anybody can become a thinker or innovator if they learn to exercise their critical thinking process.

 

Therefore, AP’s INNOVATION CULTURE strategy is not only about ‘dreaming of big new things’ for the most valuable innovations are the ones that respond to customers’ unmet needs.

 

This and the company’s model of hybrid dream teams where a team of 3-5 is formed comprising people drawn from different divisions and including a collaboration with business partner Mitsubishi Estate Residence (a company of the Mitsubishi Estate Group) as well as the five AP subsidiaries: SMART, BC, SEAC, VAARI and CLAYMORE, to independently create a project in two months. What is expected from them are work innovations, new ideas or better products and services. They share an important goal to be creators and providers of products and services that empower customers to live and enjoy life on their own terms.

“If you don’t empower everyone in the organisation to make a change and to raise a question, you won’t be able to keep up with a sudden change. We see that adaption with a goal and something to hold onto is the way to make us all move forward and move at a solid pace. The project ORIGINAL U will provide an important platform to cultivate and make things happen through staff members specialising in different disciplines working together,” said Mr. Anuphong

“Today, specialising in one field is no longer sufficient. It testifies to AP’s core values of being innovative and building together to take advantage of different perspectives from your colleagues from other lines of jobs to help create valuable products and services, ones that are change-makers that meet and exceed customers’ expectations in the future.  We are confident that the project ORIGINAL U will be another one to create and breed real corporate innovators, who will lead our organisation moving forward in anticipation of future turmoil, no matter how many crises we have to get through,” he added.

 

 

ORIGINAL U helps elevate values and quality of work to deliver valuable and meaningful AP’s products and services to customers. Mr. Ryo Matsumoto, Business Advisor – AP’s Japanese business partner who is a representative of the project, said that: “Speaking on behalf of Mitsubishi Estate Residence (a company of the Mitsubishi Estate Group) – AP’s partner which has the goal of sharing knowhow between Thailand and Japan, we joined this project because it was a good opportunity and very challenging, particularly, forming a team to find new ideas with members from diffident divisions who didn’t know each other before. Apart from understanding the changing lifestyle relating to the use of common areas in condominiums in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, getting together a hybrid team (engineering, product design and property management) in which each member has a different experience and knowhow means diversity in opinions.”

“It let you see problems and needs of customers more complete. They come together, raise questions, think, analyse, and spend time together to present solutions for individual pain points. The result provides a new dimension for the improvement of common areas in condominiums, which will be applied in the launches of new projects. So, please stay tuned”, said Mr. Matsumoto.

 

A representative from SMART Ms. Spun Paleewong, Business Development Director, who joined ORIGINAL U from Smart Service and Management Co., Ltd., an AP subsidiary in charge of property management, shared her feeling after joining the activity, “The ideas of all those teams were created out of an understanding of the pain points that will make the living of Thai people better. ORIGINAL U let us identify the pain points of our customers with more accuracy, covering both employees and residents, like solutions for cutting back on errors, management of staff workspace as well as solutions for allocating functional areas inside a condo to eliminate space functional restraints.”

 

“The current crisis is not the first or the last we have to get through the best we can. Before this, we had the Tom Yum Kung crisis in 1997, the Hamburger crisis in 2008 and now the COVID-19 crisis. All of us in the organisation needs to look ahead constructively beyond the crisis. ORIGINAL U will be another project to help us create and push for new innovators to be born at AP to make sure that AP Thailand, its subsidiaries and our business partner will be ready to deliver products and services that are ahead of all changes. We all need to keep improving, moving forward with the same goal and our minds focused on delivering the support that empowers customers to live a good life the way they want in line with our ‘EMPOWER LIVING’ purpose,” Mr. Anuphong said.