Omar Jacques Omran said innovation is a team sport built on relationships and win-win scenarios that can even bring fierce competitors together to co-innovate.

Omran, a BT150 member, is an entrepreneur and former CTO of Six Flags where he led a transformation that resulted in a $100 million net profit increase over two years.  Before joining Six Flags, Omran was the Vice President of Digital Transformation at Welbilt and the Managing Director of Welbilt’s KitchenConnect brand. Under his leadership, KitchenConnect grew into the largest cloud platform in the foodservice industry, enabling seamless connectivity for smart equipment in restaurants. He also initiated the largest digital alliance in the food service industry.

These industry alliances are notable because ultimately enterprises in various verticals will need to form value chains with co-innovation at the forefront.

Here are some of the takeaways from my chat with Omran:

The mindset for innovation. Omran said that "innovation doesn't start with technology." He said the first part of innovation is being optimistic and believing the best is yet to come and there are opportunities to improve. Perhaps the biggest mindset shift is "having empathy and generosity to knowing you get a multiplier effect by bringing people together."

Bringing teams together means partners, vendors and even competitors when there's a win-win. "By bringing partners together you can go big and faster even if you don't have the biggest budget," said Omran. "And make sure that everybody's going to win, not only you."

Six Flags as an innovation experiment. Omran said in many ways Six Flags and theme parks are small cities with food, services, retail, parking, digital maps and other common services. However, budgets are limited and the goal was to "leverage technology to create a better value for our consumers," he said.

Omran noted that Six Flags roadmap was ambitious and the only way to do it was to create a team and ally with similar companies. With the likes of HCL, Snowflake and Google Cloud, Six Flags was able to deliver cloud and data services, integrate systems and come together to leverage technology across theme park areas including point-of-sale.

Ideation. Omran said Six Flags brought together partners and vendors to come up with ideas to transform the company. These workshops led to kiosks, a new mobile app for parking, maps and theme park services and new point-of-sale systems and AI on the back end.

Relationships. Bringing vendors together revolved around relationships and values that all of the partners were on equal footing and driving wins within their expertise, said Omran. When working with competitors, Omran said it's about co-innovation and driving ideas that will benefit the entire industry and increase the total addressable market. "If you can combine budgets you'll be stronger together and go to market in a bigger way," said Omran. "But first you need trust because everybody is going to be afraid to lose a share of the pie. If you're able to trust then you can get a bigger share of the pie."

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Next-Generation Customer Experience

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innovation, business transformation, digital transformation