In early 2022, the Aboitiz Group unveiled “one of the most meaningful imperatives” in the company’s history. The Great Transformation (GT2025), as we now all know, is a massive and holistic approach to carry the legacy organization forward into the future and become the Philippines’ first techglomerate.
As our SuperDuperCon episodes this year continue to give further clarity and context to GT2025, the Group is also looking way into the future to discover new frontiers. One of the significant undertakings to come out of this is the 10-week ExO Sprint business innovation bootcamp to discover new ideas that can solve current or emerging problems and have the potential to hyperdrive Aboitiz towards exponential growth.
“This is a unique opportunity for accelerated learning in an environment geared to produce a commercial result,” said Aboitiz & Company (ACO) board member Tony Canova, in an empowering message to participants at the program kickoff in January. “Each of the ideas that comes out of this sprint could end up being the business of our future. Do not underestimate that potential. Any of you could be the leaders of this.”
Tony started the ACO Board’s Disruption Committee that focuses on driving disruptive thinking and entrepreneurial behavior. He explained that the ExO Sprint puts into action the GT2025 message of innovation, disruption, and entrepreneurship presented by Aboitiz Group President & CEO Sabin Aboitiz in his New Year Message.
“Make no mistake. This undertaking is a serious one,” he challenged the participant cohort, which is made up of team members and team leaders from Power, Food, and Infrastructure SBUs. “I promise you, this experience will inspire you and you will look back on this as one of the best business processes you ever participated in.”
In this new series, Aboitiz Eyes is featuring the ExO Sprint participants and meet the A-People behind their proposed innovations and business ideas. What we learn from these conversations may ultimately lead us to understanding the qualities that describe the future-ready Aboitiz person anchored by GT2025.
What does an Urban Planner have in common with an Innovation advocate and a Product Manager? At a glance, they’re vastly different practices but there are a lot of surprising similarities to this unlikely band of A-People, most notably, their capacity to demonstrate the value of innovation to find better ways to advance business and communities — qualities befitting a transformed person in the New Aboitiz Techglomerate.
Meet Rogie Abala (AEV), Sharleen Salazar (AIC), and Franco Espinos (UBX). Despite coming from different business units and serving different functions, the trio put their knowledge and expertise together to create a potentially game-changing concept that has the potential to better the lives of people.
“The idea was to get people with different perspectives of the project,” said Franco, a product manager for UBX. “It came as a complement because each one has our own specific skill set and the way we organized it is that for each specific project there are specialists on the roles.”
Their team’s final output, aptly named IdentityScape, aims to integrate all of a person’s pertinent identifiers or records into one secure application to create a single source of truth to be used in various transactions that may require them — e.g. loans, VISA applications — thereby potentially saving people a lot of time and effort.
“Through IdentityScape and digital identity technology, we target the development of a usable and trustworthy portable digital identity to empower Filipinos and inspire optimism about the future. Confidence and optimism driven by digital trust,” explained Salazar, the Project Lead of IdentityScape, Urban Planner, and Design Management lead for Aboitiz InfraCapital’s Economic Estates.
For AEV’s Innovation Manager Rogie Abala, ExO Sprint and IdentityScape was a shining example of the Group’s value of innovation at play. “Being innovative, agile, and entrepreneurial — these are things that we want to imbibe across the organization,” he noted.
As the strategist of the project, Rogie linked the team to the relevant resource persons and subject matter experts to share their inputs and validate the potential of IdentityScape. “One of my contributions is identifying who our key stakeholders internally that we can tap, as well as to assess if it’s really valuable to our organization. Is it a disruptor? Is it really relevant for the business in the long-term?”
Following the end of the ExO Sprint, the trio reflected on their experience and the lessons they took away from the program. “You have to have perseverance. We were on a rollercoaster the whole workshop. We were really happy when we came up with so many ideas, especially the first few weeks and then after that, everything kept getting cut off or invalidated, so really just have to keep going,” shared Sharry.
Franco goes on further to explain that having entrepreneurial instincts and a founder’s mindset is essential for succeeding in a fast-paced environment like the ExO Sprint: “It’s one thing for you to have the tasks on hand, but it’s another to put on the hat of an entrepreneur and completely turn around the entire project because you’re not only thinking of one individual component at a time but you have to think of the entire business in itself.”
Meanwhile, Rogie emphasizes the importance of keeping an open mind and being courageously authentic. “If you have this kind of idea, don’t keep it to yourself. If you do not ask, the answer is always no. Be vocal about your ideas. Talk to the people who can help execute your idea. Always ask!”
