Most Innovative Company – AirAsia

Before I begin to comment let clarify two things:

1. I am a fan of Fast Company, in fact this is the very magazine that encourages me to think beyond employment and to go out and do what I really love to do, which is why I ended becoming a brand consultant & entrepreneur in my own right.

2. I love and travel AirAsia all the time. In fact it is the really affordable transport that allows me to visit my wife in Indonesia regularly when we are dating or travel around the places AirAsia goes when I am bored on the weekend.

But … to have AirAsia ranked as one of the 50 leading innovative company is a bit of an overkill. I think at most AirAsia should win some sort of an award like – Best Company or Smartest Managed Company or Best Airline but not Innovative.

The owners of AirAsia took the risk and make the right move to go into a low cost travel industry because there is a BIG window to capitalised here in South East Asia and most important of all, there is a ready market – everyone in South East Asia is having higher household income, people are more educated than before so travelling is something very natural. I would say, AirAsia is very smart – strategically but not Innovative.

Innovative is when you think of companies like Apple, Google etc – doing really really extraodinary stuff or things that are so in the future that the rest of the world are still struggling with  what they have now. AirAsia still has yet to prove themselves in this category,  therefore I personally think Innovative is certainly not appropriate.

If (its a very big IF/assumption here) FastCompany want to complement an Asian company or to have at least one included because of the rising phenomena of Asian economies play today, FC should realise that there is no real rush to do so. Eventually there will be good Asian companies that will take the leap and become trully innovative. This of course I am excluding Japanese companies.

The challenge to innovation especially in South East Asia is a Dummy-thingy. Go to the entrepreneurial grassroots, stick around the crowd – no venture capitalist in this region is funding any company or ideas that is INNOVATIVE because they lack vision and behave like a typical Asian – look-down-on-their-own-kind-type. Even AirAsia has to fund themselves when they first started. While at the same time, these VCs are saying – how come there are no innovative ideas to fund and the governments are pushing so hard to produce innovative enterprises.

Seriously, when an Asian comes to you and say – “Hey I have this really great and innovative idea, first in the world stuff”; How you think another Asian will respond? But if a Caucasian guy or someone from the US or Japan comes around and say the same thing, most people will already give them 20% for believability without hearing them further. 

So, to have INNOVATION mushrooming in this part of the world is going to be huge challenge because Innovative people are scary to people with the moolah and even sometime to the government themselves. Even for a smart company like AirAsia, the government related airline like MAS has for a period of time find it hard to deal with the fact that AirAsia even existed. What more if there is one that is trully innovative?

There are probably a good number of reasons for the lack of Innovation in the SEA market starting from our education system right down to the social conditioning that we are accustomed or forced to comply with. There is really no point to discuss the reasons blah blah blah because it’s never really going to get solved.

The only think I have to say is that if you think you are innovative – Just Do It!