SPH conducts innovation day to upskill employees

Singapore Press Holdings  (SPH) held a group-wide Innovation Day in a bid to train a mass of its employees in innovation skills. These skills include design thinking, customer-centricity and digital proficiency, aimed to be a ‘future-ready’ organisation.The Innovation Day came at the peak of a 100-day intensive innovation project, which involved employees from across the company. The project was aimed at spurring a more entrepreneurial culture within the company and was facilitated by SPH’s innovation partner Venturetec, a consultancy that has worked with various organisations across the Asia Pacific.As part of the project, employees formed cross-functional teams to undergo an accelerated innovation training programme, which will form a blueprint for future employee training in innovation skills. The teams were then tasked to pitch their new product ideas on Innovation Day to an executive panel comprising the media company’s senior management - including CEO Ng Yat Chung and deputy CEO Anthony Tan - to further develop their concepts and bring them to market.In addition, the event also showcased designs for SPH’s new dedicated innovation spaces, which SPH employees and a Singapore Polytechnic team had worked on during three design workshops.According to the release, staff visiting the event, held at the SPH auditorium, interacted with SPH teams whilst working on new products such as freelancer platform Zomwork and jobs portal Fastjobs. The staffs also had the chance to vote on their preferred product ideas proposed by SPH’s senior management as well as offer their own suggestions for new projects and products. The release added that this was for the staffs to “learn from the experiences of the employees who had participated in the 100-day innovation project”.“Innovation is an often-used buzzword, but what it means in SPH’s context is to become more customer-focused and develop a deeper understanding of our audiences, so we can offer them more engaging content and products,” Tan said.“Our employees are an essential part of our journey to become a tomorrow-ready media business and they are extremely motivated to be part of this exciting transformation,” he added.