“Small ideas change the world!”

Major changes throughout all industries are expected based on new digital technologies in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Thus, companies are busy working for “Digital Transformation (DT),” which is considered as a key survival strategy in the new era.

CJ OliveNetworks IT Business Division is making various attempts to reinforce the DT capability of the staff by newly establishing the Digital Innovation Task Force this year, as the company believes that the staff must first develop a “digital mind” and understand the DT concept to lead the DT of the group and consumer business.

As a start, the company held the “Innovative Idea Contest' last september, targeting the IT Business Division staff.

The contest started based on the belief that innovation for DT must be founded on ideas that even the trivial parts in daily life can be “digitalized.”

 
The contest’s themes were ideas for “reinforcing business competitiveness,” such as improving the revenue, profit and loss as well as reducing the production cost and other costs, in addition to ideas for “innovating the way of working,” like improving immersion in work, automation, and data use. Any staff of CJ OliveNetworks IT Business Division could participate in the contest.

In particular, the unique evaluation method that utilized HUBPOT, an open innovation platform of CJ OliveNetworks, made the contest much more interesting. Those who wish to participate in it registered their ideas on HUBPOT, and then other staff personally evaluated them and funded the 50,000 coins given to each person for the ideas that they liked best. As those who are evaluating could not only fund but could also leave tags that freely express their thoughts on the ideas, it provided a space for open communication.

△ The staff of CJ OliveNetworks’ IT Business Division participated in the Innovative Idea Contest

through HUBPOT, an open innovation platform.

As a result, 60 ideas were registered and over 12million coins were funded, showing the heated response of both the participants and the evaluators.

After the preliminary evaluation by the staff, the executives and those responsible for the related work finally evaluated the ideas. Finally the award ceremony was held on November 12 in CJ OliveNetworks' headquarters amidst high expectations.

Those who won in the fierce ideas competition for innovating the way of working and reinforcing the company’s business competitiveness were all gathered at the ceremony! Which idea, then, had the honor of winning the contest?

△ CEO Lee Kyung-bae (center) of CJ OliveNetworks, who awarded the winners of the “Innovative Idea Contest,”

and the winners of the Grand Prix, Excellence Award, and Participation Award.

First, Hwang Jeong-hwan of the Distribution Digital Team and Hwang Soon-cheol of the Global Planning Team had the honor of winning the Participation Award. Both ideas earned the praise of the staff for enhancing work convenience and efficiency.

Hwang Jeong-hwan had submitted the idea of systematically managing documents and reinforcing work efficiency by reducing the time that it takes to share documents and integrating data saved in each staff’s PC with a “document centralization system.”

△ Hwang Jeong-hwan (right) of the Distribution Digital Team, who won the Participation Award

with the idea of “Saving precious time when sharing work / collaborating”

Hwang Soon-cheol proposed a measure for motivating the staff to more actively present and execute ideas that are related to work at the corporate level.

△ Hwang Soon-cheol of the Global Planning Team, who won the Participation Award

for having proposed “A way of vitalizing the presentation of ideas and enhancing their effectiveness”

Next, the Excellence Award went to Kang Tae-ho of the Food IT Service Team and Kim Geon of the Business Support Part, who proposed the idea of pursuing digitalization in daily life by utilizing IT solutions and platforms.

Kang proposed the idea of transparently sharing the breakdown of donations by recording the fund collection breakdown of charity groups on a blockchain platform. The idea was evaluated by other staff as a “win-win strategy” that kills two birds?spreading a positive donating culture and merging donation with technology?with one stone.

△ Kang Tae-ho of the Food IT Service Team, who won the Excellence Award

with the idea of “Building a donation platform based on blockchain”

Kim also won the Excellence Award with the unique idea of supplementing the “Smart Workplace” solution at CJ OliveNetworks’ headquarters, which earned many positive responses from the evaluators. He proposed utilizing internet protocol (IP) information of wireless internet routers (access points, APs) to smoothly grasp the location of colleagues who sit in “free seats” where the staff can freely sit on each day and not on fixed seats inside the office, to check which particular IP user has accessed AP at which location.

Then, among all the unique and innovative great ideas, which was the most outstanding idea that won the Grand Prix?

It was precisely the “idea of making the in-house system more convenient,” which was proposed by Kim Geon of the Business Support Part. The idea was to simplify the approval system for an enhanced work processing speed and efficiency. Kim proposed integrating the processes of requesting a user’s right of the in-house system and downregulating the final approval stage to assign the responsibilities to departments.

The idea caught the inconveniences that everyone felt but easily dismissed with a keen eye and curiosity, thereby proposing “innovation.” As a result, Kim won the Grand Prix and the Excellence Award at the same time, which was highly applauded.

 △ Kim Geon of the Business Support Part, who won the Grand Prix and Excellence Award

with the idea of “Search (let me know where you are)” and “More convenient use of the in-house system”

Those who won the prizes were awarded digital devices, such as the latest tablet PC and smartwatch, corresponding to a contest that pursues “digitalization.”

Other than the Grand Prix, Excellence Award, and Participation Award, on this day’s ceremony, the “Pro Tagger Award” was given to the person who registered the greatest number of tags on the ideas registered on the HUBPOT and thus vitalized the contest. In addition, the “Best Feedback Award” was given to the person who registered an idea most sincerely, while the “Idea Bank Award” was given to the person who registered a large number of creative ideas. Furthermore, CJ gift cards were given by drawing lots among the staff who funded each awarded idea with coins, making the awarding ceremony much more exciting.

The company plans to materialize the innovative ideas selected through the contest, review their possibility for implementation, and adopt them as future driving forces of DT.

Thanks to the staff who generously poured their unique and creative ideas, and readily participated in the company’s journey of innovation toward a “Digital Company”, the future of CJ OliveNetworks IT Business Division looks brighter! (The end)

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