China Eastern Airlines: “Win in the Youth” project creates the innovative and entrepreneurial stage for young employees

Company profile
 
Headquartered in Shanghai, China Eastern Airlines Co., Ltd. (CEA) was founded in April 1995, and it is a Chinese-foreign joint venture launched by China Eastern Air Holding Company (CEAH). As the core of CEAH, CEA was listed in New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1997. Due to consolidation and resource integration through the years, CEA has evolved into an integrated service system focusing on the core business of civil passenger and cargo transportation, as well as a range of additional businesses including general aviation, aviation catering, import and export, financial futures, advertising media and industrial investment.
 
As a member of the SkyTeam Alliance, CEA has, through connecting with the Alliance, built an air network starting from the Shanghai hub and reaching 1057 destinations in 179 countries and regions around the world. CEA ranks in the top ten of many operating indexes including fleet size and passenger volume.
 
Challenges
 
Promoting public entrepreneurship and mass innovation is the inevitable choice for China to cultivate and create the new power of economic and social development. Since 2015, about 10,000 companies emerged in China. However, compared with the innovation markets inspired by external environment continuously and the technological innovation-based enterprises who value employees’ innovative ability, the traditional enterprises are usually lack of atmosphere for entrepreneurship and innovation and channels and platforms to realize the creative ideas. Some ambitious youth who are determined to promote the enterprise and social progress, don't have enough space to development, which hinders the sustainable development of China Eastern Airlines in some degree.
 
For CEA, it is needed to think about how to stimulate the creative spirit of young employees and innovative talents, so as to inject new vitality into the development of the company.
 
Solution
 
As a large state-owned enterprise, CEA has a profound understanding of the importance to expand the growth space for employees and to stimulate the awareness of independent innovation. CEA creates an internal innovative culture atmosphere, launches innovative brand activities and builds entrepreneurship incubator platforms in diversified ways. CEA has gradually built “Win in the Youth” brand activities with the core of the open, interactive, effective and creative display and development space.
 
Create atmosphere to build a culture of innovation
 
Focusing on the theme of “reform” and “innovation”, CEA made full use of traditional media and new media, and carried out activities by themed lectures, CYL Day activities, training and exchange etc. At the same time, together with the “rationalization proposal” project, CEA actively carried out various types of innovation collection activities to tap innovative ideas from young employees and promote rationalization proposals.
 
Build CEAH brand to inspire youth to be innovative
 
Since 2014, CEA has begun to build a “Win in the Youth” brand series contests. The contests collected innovative ideas from young employees in 38 units of the company, and each contest was themed with different business module, like operation, logistics, customer service (APP) and marketing. The contests, made up of the proposal submission and the on-site presentation and other forms, encourages young employees, from the customer demand, to optimize the working modes and methods by research and development of new systems, technological innovation and improvement of business processes in diverse ways. In 2015, the social media interactive marketing creative contest used “Double Conference Venues” format for the first time—outside-venue interactive experience + inside-venue PK .The participating young employees set contest as an opportunity to stimulate their creative potential and show creative talent. Through carrying out different theme contests, CEA has constantly strengthened the brand of “Win in the Youth” to explore innovative talents, discover innovation achievement and develop innovation team, thus promoting the application and promotion of innovation achievements for building a platform for young people.
 
Build a platform to transfer creative concept into real services 
 
In 2014, CEA launched the youth Powerise service platforms, like “Rui Qi Entrepreneurship Service” and selected out the winning project “Win in the Youth” and other creativity. It has promoted the project selection, support, and incubation orderly. CEA invited well-known instructors to give centralized instruction, expand employees’ innovative entrepreneurial thinking, and inspire their creative inspiration; By organizing youth innovation salon and youth entrepreneurship lectures, CEA encouraged the enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and provided project practice platform for employees whom have entrepreneurial passion to cultivate innovation projects suitable for the market and boost benign circulation of creativity from the start to the landing, aiming to create suitable soil for youth to launch innovative practice and promote the application and promotion of innovation achievement .
 
In the process of innovation project incubator and landing, the company provided seasonably post transfers opportunity for parts of employees who would be responsible for the follow-up and implementation of the project full-timely, which has facilitated the project to landing effectively and also provided a flexible development channel for young employees.
 
Achievements
 
In 2015, CEA carried out more than 300 promotion themed with innovation and reform with the coverage of 120 thousand person-times; a total of 21,770 rationalization proposals were proposed, and 9,194 effective proposals  were adopted. 145 innovation achievements got display and promotion.
 
Social benefits
 
The” Win in the Youth” contests adds innovative elements for stable corporate culture, and has become an important carrier and driving force for excavating youth innovation projects and promoting transformation of projects. The brand contests inspires a large number of young employees’ work enthusiasm and innovation ability and further helps CEA youth to realize their dreams.
 
Economic benefits
 
The contests have been successfully held four times, involving 36 business modules, and a number of outstanding projects and youth elites in the field of Internet, e-commerce, logistics, transport control and others have been emerged. The total involved projects have accumulated to 255 with 347 person-times and 45 winners. Through the promotion and implementation in this incubation platform, 8 projects have been successfully landed and began to enter the stage of research & develop and use. One patents (Aircraft Emergency Room was used 3909 times in 2015) and two brands were produced. The DOC project from the contest in 2014 saved 337.6 million yuan fuel costs for CEA in 2015; the winning project “Palm 3 CEA app” has 2.2 million page hits in 2015, which has effectively promoted the internal communication and coordination, and improved the work efficiency. The winning projects in 2015 revenue reached 0.76 million yuan.
 
The specific implementation of innovation projects has also promoted the transformation and development of CEA. The company has constantly developed new marketing channels to better serve the passengers through new technologies and services. The customer satisfaction score of CEA reached 88.11 points out of a possible 100 in 2015.
 
Prospect
 
CEA will continue to promote the” Win in the Youth” brand contests, expand the related business areas and expand the scope of employee engagement; at the same time, it will strengthen employees’ ability of innovation and effectiveness, mobilize the youth to be committed to innovation breakthrough based on their posts, and promote innovation achievements landing in the key areas; furthermore, a good atmosphere will be created to encourage to establish youth innovation alliance for carrying out innovation activities, fully mining the potential of young employees and giving employees a greater stage for talent and career development .