International Airport Summit 2026 speaker - George Ioannou, King Salman International Airport’s Director of Innovation, argues airports must focus on adopting and scaling open innovation rather than sourcing ideas.
For years, open innovation has been talked about and explained at length: what it is, why it matters, and how airports should engage with startups, partners, and ecosystems to solve their evolving problems.
Most major airports today are running hackathons, accelerators, challenge calls, partnerships, and many even have their own innovation labs set up. All of these are excellent components of open innovation. The constraint with open innovation now is that the supply of ideas is growing far quicker than airports’ ability to absorb them.
The real bottleneck
Open innovation is often described as looking beyond the airport’s walls to bring in external ideas, solutions and partners. Many innovation programs are already very effective at identifying promising solutions. Far fewer are as effective at helping the organisation adopt those solutions, and that gap is where most of the value is lost.
When innovation lives as a parallel activity rather than something that changes operations, organisations often find that even with successful experimentation, results do not easily translate into operational adoption.
Where innovation gets stuck
In complex operating environments, successful pilots can still face challenges around ownership, funding, and pathways to scale. The innovation team is often expected to bring the answers, but they are rarely the team that will operate, maintain, or fund the solution over the long term. Those responsibilities sit elsewhere, which means the relevant business and operational teams need to be involved well before a pilot ends.
Some innovations naturally attract more attention than others. Passenger-facing applications, AI enabled services, and automation often receive the most attention because their impact is highly visible and easier to showcase. Behind them sit less visible but equally important opportunities in maintenance, turnaround processes, asset utilisation, and workforce productivity. When intentionally designed to support one another, the combination delivers the strongest results.
The large transformation initiatives also tend to attract attention, but meaningful change does not always arrive through a single breakthrough. Smaller operational improvements can build on one another and deliver substantial results over time. This is the principle behind the aggregation of marginal gains, where many modest improvements combine to produce a larger overall effect.
Teams also need enough space to think. When everyone is occupied running the airport at full capacity, there is no room to step back, challenge assumptions, explore alternatives and rethink established processes.
Patterns worth reconsidering
1. The more ideas we bring in, the more we are innovating
The volume of startups, proposals, and technology providers continues to grow. Running more challenges or onboarding more startups does not automatically translate into great impact. The value depends on what the organisation can integrate and scale.
A pilot that does not proceed can still be useful. It may provide the evidence needed to stop investing in a solution that is not suitable. The problem arises when promising pilots get stuck for the reasons we’re discussing here.
The strongest programmes changed their approach and, rather than searching broadly for innovation, they focused on specific problems with defined ownership and clear pathways to adoption from day one.
2. Passenger-facing innovation should be the primary focus
Passenger experience remains one of the most important objectives for airports. Many of the improvements passengers value most, however, are enabled behind the scenes.
Improving baggage reliability, on time departures, queue predictability, asset availability, wayfinding, cleanliness, and proactive disruption management all shape the passenger experience. They may not always be presented as passenger innovation, but passengers feel their effects directly.
Digital products and passenger-facing technologies can then build on strong operational foundations, extending their value rather than compensating for underlying process weaknesses.
3. Pilots are the safest way to innovate
Pilots are necessary in complex environments such as airports. They provide an opportunity to test assumptions, expose risks, and collect evidence before making a larger commitment.
They are most useful when the route beyond the pilot has been considered from the outset. Before testing begins, there should already be alignment on what success looks like and what happens afterwards: Who owns the outcome? How does it get funded? How is it handed over and integrated into operations?
In other sectors, pilots are increasingly treated as part of procurement to help drive decisions. The goal is to validate which solution they will adopt, not whether to experiment with it in the first place.
Without this mindset, the organisation accumulates successful pilots that don’t drive meaningful change.
4. Open innovation is about bringing in external ideas
External partnerships are critical as airports cannot, and should not, build everything internally. Some of the most valuable opportunities, however, never come through an accelerator, supplier, or startup programme.
Frontline teams see problems long before they appear on innovation roadmaps. This can be from our ground handlers, maintenance teams, operations and retail staff and many others. They understand where time is lost, where processes are repeatedly worked around, and where seemingly small changes could make a practical difference.
Those same teams are often under-represented in formal innovation activities. A strong open innovation model combines external knowledge and capabilities with insight from the people closest to the work.
Manufacturing has long applied this principle through continuous improvement. Frontline teams help define the problem, while innovation teams and external partners provide the tools, expertise, or capabilities needed to solve it.
Frontline employees should have a clear way to raise ideas and take part in developing the response. If we solve the problems alongside the people most impacted by them, we will then see positive effects across multiple other domains.
What this looks like in practice
Airports have become far better at sourcing ideas and solutions than they were 10 years ago. The next phase is about building the capability to adopt and scale them.
Assign ownership early. The team that will operate the solution needs to be involved before a vendor is selected, not after a pilot is completed.
Be clear about what follows the pilot. Every test should start with a simple question: If this works, what changes? Does it move into a contract, a framework agreement, or a wider rollout? If that answer is unclear, the pilot should not start.
Expose the solution to real conditions early. Controlled testing has value, but it can hide the issues that determine whether a solution will last. Integration, maintenance, training, and operational variability become visible only when the solution gets close to the environment in which it will be used.
Create space for thinking. Innovation cannot happen when teams are constantly operating at capacity. Even small, regular windows for reflection and problem solving can unlock better ideas. Carve out dedicated time for employees to just think and tinker. The cadence of this must fit your specific company and ways of working, but creativity will only emerge in the space between activity.
A shift in how airports think about open innovation
The strongest innovation efforts begin with three questions: What problem are we solving? Who owns it? What happens if the solution works?
Open innovation is not about collecting the greatest number of ideas. It is about bringing together the right people, knowledge and partners to solve meaningful problems, then making sure the solution becomes part of how the airport operates.
I will be speaking at International Airport Summit 2026 taking place on 10-12 November in Rome. Join to hear me speak about our innovation work on my session ‘Designing smoother airport journeys through data-driven insights’ where I will be joined by Davide Caenaro, Head of Information Services, Zurich Airport and Brian Cobb, Chief Innovation Officer, Cincinnati Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG).
Register for your free* ticket today to network with me at the event.
* Free aviation leader tickets are applicable to senior managers and above from airports, airlines, regulatory bodies and aviation authorities.
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