We are at a stage in which change has become a constant. The advances and technological disruption of recent years present us with numerous challenges and opportunities that, in the case of the infrastructure and mobility sector, are already materializing in new models that until now we have only seen in movies. At Globalvia we are aware of the need to adapt and anticipate all these changes and therefore, innovation has been part of our DNA since our origins.
In 2020 we created Openvia, our technological and innovation platform for the Group, through which we channel all our most disruptive projects focused on offering mobility services and solutions to our users, but do you know how the seed began to germinate? Well…keep reading!
We go back to the beginning of 2019, when we began the internal search for the “Innovation Champions”, a tireless squad of committed and eager people, willing to live innovation in a more active way, with the idea of starting and pushing the journey of innovation throughout the Globalvia Group. To create our team of innovators, each candidate had to submit a video that told of the skills, strengths, and motivations they could offer to the project. Valuing the desire and ingenuity of each one, the Innovation Committee chose an Innovation Squad, the top 25 workers from Globalvia Madrid and our Concessions, who would take the first steps on this very interesting and rewarding path to promote innovation in the Group: detecting opportunities for improvement, seeing an idea being born, working on it, achieving the best version with a Minimum Viable Product, making it grow and reaping the benefits; we believe and create.
During the first months, we held various talks and dynamic meetings to form ourselves as a team and that are teaching and consolidating us in this new path of innovation, discovering together the why and what for of this Innovation Squad, and above all the how. In this way, at Globalvia we created an open innovation model among its own employees, which allows creativity to be transformed into value to improve society, all under the premise of placing our users at the center to improve their travel experience. As part of this path, we enter the interesting world of agile methodologies, which begin to help us work focused on achieving an end, in an effective, dynamic, transparent, flexible and optimized way. In this way, we strengthen among the people who make up Globalvia the need to work based on a culture of innovation, recognizing the need to not be afraid to question our status quo, adapt to change, being aware that failure is also part of the process of success.
Four and a half years later, we can say that at Globalvia we are a benchmark in the mobility sector and we have managed to optimize our resources thanks to various incremental improvements that we have implemented. In addition, all our efforts and disruptive ideas have materialized in the achievement of major milestones for the entire Group, such as:
- Alliances to improve mobility and highway transformation.
- Solutions such as Geomic by Openvia, an intelligent CMMS for asset management.
- Systems related to toll collection.
- The OneZBE solution for managing low emission zones.
- Digital mobility applications such as Tap&Go, for contactless payment in the metro, and Slora by Globalvia, the toll payment app.
- Multimodal platforms such as Meep Sevilla by Globalvia, in which public and private operators create synergies to offer the inhabitants of a city all available means of transportation and configure their preferred route.
From the Globalvia Innovation Squad, we continue to advance tirelessly, teaming up, building and paving the way in an open innovation ecosystem, in order to change the world together! We want to be the benchmark in smart, connected and safe infrastructures, now it’s time to make it happen!