GMR floats Innovex, a Group-wide platform to drive future initiatives, growth

GMR Group has launched a new business vertical, GMR Innovex, dedicated to fostering and driving innovation.

Over the years, GMR has redefined air travel in India by building world-class infrastructure, embracing innovations and employing futuristic technologies at its airports. Innovations like India’s first fully paperless e-boarding solution, indigenous self-service check-in machines, Express Security Check, and Face recognition based passenger processing, to name a few, were all incubated, developed and rolled out with in-house expertise.

Building on this foundation and with a vision to create an enabling framework for innovation across all aspects of the business, GMR Innovex will operate on an ‘Open Innovation’ model, acting as an ‘Innovation Exchange’ to partner with startups, corporates, innovation platforms, research institutions and academia to bring innovative ideas and solutions to life and help to nurture and sustain a Culture of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A new facility at Hyderabad Airport

A dedicated new facility for innovation has also been established at the Hyderabad Airport campus to act as a platform for various innovation activities by various collaborating startups, industry partners and GMR employees.

GMR Innovex announced innovation-focused partnerships with multiple new partners, including Airbus; Plug and Play (leading global corporate innovation platform); Swedish Institute; T–Hub (Innovation intermediary and business incubator based in Hyderabad); IIT-Hyderabad; International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and Schulich Business School (Business School of York University Located in Toronto, Canada).

Pradeep Singh Kharola, Secretary, MoCA, in a statement said, “Aviation and Innovation are synonymous words, and the ultimate innovation is happening in Aviation. During Covid times, the aviation sector was hard hit but has emerged stronger. Many new technologies took shape during this period and were all aimed at making the industry robust. The future of air travel is one of the passengers just walking through an airport in a entirely paperless way. GMR Airports has been the first airport to launch the e-boarding service, and today 90 per cent of passengers use this method. GMR Innovex will become an excellent hub to train talent for various specialised jobs across the aviation industry.”

Somesh Kumar, Chief Secretary, Telangana, said, “We are glad that GMR innovation is stationed in our state. With its strategic presence around the globe and being in one of the key sectors, GMR Innovation hub is going to make a difference.”

GBS Raju, Business Chairman, Airports, GMR Group, said, “GMR Group has been a pioneer in leveraging and adopting innovations across its business verticals. Given the potential of today’s new-age, digital savvy, entrepreneurial generation, our objective is to create a culture and atmosphere of innovation and take forward some of the best ideas to their logical fruition on a global scale through this new vertical. We hope the diverse landscape of GMR Group will help our collaborators to experiment on a wide canvas which is very essential in any creative domain. Through GMR Innovex, we wish to position GMR as an innovation thought leader and lay the foundation for the next phase of our growth journey.”

SGK Kishore, ED – South, Chief Innovation Officer – GMR Airports, said, “GMR Innovex is a platform that will help both GMR as well as our partners and stakeholders to look beyond the present and get ready for challenges and opportunities of tomorrow. The partnerships will serve as a springboard for upcoming initiatives in this space.”

GMR Innovex will focus on innovations across digital and non-digital domains to deliver improved efficiency, better customer experience and higher value to all stakeholders. It will create a structured mechanism to build creative ideas, nurture and foster them, and build a Go-To-Market strategy for all successful initiatives. It will provide an avenue for its partners to work on their ideas and bring them to a forum to validate. This exchange’s advantage is that collaborators can also try their products/services at GMR Innovex across a very large landscape of Airports, Air Cargo, MRO, Logistics, and other Infrastructure sectors.