How might we unlock the power of innovation within DFW Airport employees? .

DFW International airport

Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is a major international airport located between the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas, United States. It is the largest hub for American Airlines, serving as a primary gateway for domestic and international travel. DFW airport spans over 17,000 acres and has five terminals with a total of 182 gates. It offers a wide range of amenities, including numerous restaurants, shops, lounges, and a range of services such as currency exchange, baggage storage, and car rentals. The airport is also equipped with advanced technology and infrastructure to handle a high volume of travelers efficiently.

Overview

Dallas-Fort Worth Airport’s (DFW) Innovation Office and Giant Innovation Consultancy developed an innovation mindset training to help DFW employees lean toward innovative thinking. This training is the foundation for developing an innovative mindset. The “innovation mindset” training deployed to all employees of the airport defined the process in an accessible and engaging modular web-based format. However, through our research, we learned that there are opportunities for improvement that are grounded in the employee’s experience with the training. Thus, our research uncovered that the opportunity to unlock innovation to all employees was to imagine a source of repeated experiences derived from the “innovation mindset” content grounded in the context of air travel to be “played” after or independent of the innovation mindset training. The team created a prototype which we called Innovation Gamestorming which is a two-tiered prototype that is a survey and gamified innovation mindset activities.

Playing to innovate.

  • Understand it.

    My initial role included observation of the spaces at the airport where customer facing employees performed their job. As part of a team I also participated and helped draft what would become our focus groups interviews that included subject matter experts in experiential learning and innovation.

  • Plan it.

    My previous experience in teaching and learning and teacher and leader coaching gave our team a hunch of using repeated experiences as habit forming for our prototype. Utilizing previous content from training our prototype used a simple framework to deploy a quick content refresher relevant to the context of airport operations with novel scenarios.

  • Prototype it.

    Our users self selected the time and number of occurrences of experiences. My role within the context of the prototype included some front end experience and content design, storyboarding and planning of deployment of experience. I co-designed the team dynamics by ensuring that all team members felt they had an equitable amount of tasks and experiences that both contributed to the project and their own experiences within the project.

    Main roles: ethnography, focus group interviews, content research, front end design, storyboarding and planning, team dynamics design

Solution

Our prototype surfaced an opportunity that allows innovation to become part of the identity of each of the employees at DFW airport. By changing their beliefs about themselves and how innovation works within their responsibilities and experiences at the airport. Through repeated intentional behavior that might turn into habits. Our prototype proved that activities that are obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying create a customized repeated experience that allows the user to continue to build innovation habits using the context of the airport. Thus, unlocking the power of innovation.