Innovation Challenges

Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Hospitality, Retail

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Differentiating Staytion Co-Working Space As Business Lifestyle Hub

Stellar Lifestyle owns and operates Staytion, which offers a range of flexible co-working solutions for businesses of all sizes, including dedicated spaces, monthly subscriptions, daily and hourly plans. Staytion has a unique advantage in its strategic location, being situated beside SMRT train stations, making it highly convenient for commuters and visitors to access, either as an ad-hoc or planned visit. Staytion customers’ use of the space can range from on-need-basis phone calls to full-day remote meetings. Staytion offers a highly convenient and accessible location for people to conduct business or have meetings, providing an extension of the office or an option for working out of office, and enables Staytion customers to save time on travel, access proper remote-work facilities and have a more productive workday.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle is looking for ideas to make Staytion a long-term success and grow their customer base and revenue. These ideas can range from business models to differentiation in customer experience and services, all the way to partnerships and collaborations. While ideating, please consider Staytion as a startup looking for its growth direction - all proven solution ideas with a solid business case to increase the engagement of customers and create a memorable experience for them, leading to higher customer retention rates, are welcome.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Hospitality, Retail

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Driving In-Store Traffic From Online Stores

This challenge is organised by Stellar Lifestyle, a business arm of SMRT Corporation Limited, with their partner Japan East Railway Company (JR East) to address challenges faced by retail and transit operators in Singapore and Japan.

● Stellar Lifestyle is the largest managing agent of retail and advertising spaces in Singapore’s rail network, and its growing portfolio includes mall management and outdoor media & digital engagement platforms. They have invested in new businesses, such as co-working spaces, unmanned concepts and dark stores, with a vision to grow them into a new core.
● JR East is the operator for trains including Shinkansen (high speed bullet train) in eastern Japan. It is the largest passenger railway company in Japan, serving about 13 million passengers daily. JR East Group also operates a variety of lifestyle businesses such as shopping malls, retail shops, restaurants, hotels, as well as office building management. Outside Japan, JR East has a presence for its lifestyle business unit with the establishment of Japan Rail Cafe in Singapore and Taiwan.

What We Are Looking For

The Problem Solver may propose their solutions that offer these possibilities, but not limited to:
● Omnichannel integration. Integrate the online and offline shopping experience, providing customers with a seamless and convenient shopping experience across all channels.
● Real-time digital marketplace. Provide real-time inventory information to customers, enabling them to check product availability in-store, reserve items for pickup, and purchase products online for in-store pickup.
● Rewards function. Incentivise customers to shop both online and in-store through a reward mechanism. The rewards mechanism can be integrated with existing or other loyalty programmes (e.g. WINK+).
● Drive in-store purchase behavior. Able to promote retailers’ exclusive deals and promotions for in-store purchases, enticing customers to visit physical stores and make purchases.
● Personalisation. Designed to provide personalised recommendations and promotions to customers based on their browsing and purchase history.
● Integration of mobile payments. The solution should enable customers to make in-store purchases conveniently through their mobiles, ensuring a seamless experience.
● Sustainability considerations. The development of the solution should consider sustainability elements such as supply chain optimisation to reduce inventory waste and overstocking, green energy, energy efficiency, environment conservation, carbon management etc.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Food Services, Hospitality, Retail

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Fully-Automated Retail Concepts And F&B Sustainable Innovations To Reduce Reliance On Manpower

The retail and food & beverage (F&B) sectors are facing a dwindling supply of manpower, and increase in labor/retraining costs due to staff attrition. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for automation and unmanned solutions, delivered in a contactless manner, to support operations and increase productivity. This has led to an increased interest in unmanned technology innovations such as autonomous delivery, self-checkout, and robotic kitchen automations as a potential way of achieving cost savings in the long run. Some of the innovations that have been tested/trialed include unmanned cash registers and convenience stores that recognise and allow customer access through mobile app, video analytics, and biometrics. However, such concepts that require large initial investments are difficult to scale.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are looking for innovative and sustainable ideas that leverage unmanned autonomous technology to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and enhance the customer experience. These solutions can leverage technologies such as computer vision, sensors and artificial intelligence.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Food Services, Land Transport, Logistics, Retail

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Automated Goods Delivery Within Train Station Retail Space

SMRT train stations were not built to support the current use of space for retail activities. Stations are not equipped with loading bays or cargo lift infrastructure to service retail spaces which are typically located underground (e.g. Esplanade and Dhoby Ghaut). This has inconvenienced Stellar Lifestyle’s tenants, as their logistic partners have to use either passenger lifts or fast-moving escalators to deliver supplies. Delivery runs happen during weekdays, which may result in jams/delays, commuter flow bottlenecks and safety issues. The lack of proper infrastructure also leads to more time wasted on deliveries to tenants within the train stations’ retail space.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are open to new innovations as well as re-configuration of existing solutions (e.g. use of vertical/diagonal platform lifts, robot trolleys/stair-climbers) to solve/automate/ease any part of the delivery challenge all the way from the delivery vehicle to the retail space.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Food Services, Retail

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Transforming Train Stations Into Destinations Through Data-driven Community Engagement

Through this challenge, Stellar Lifestyle and JR East want to explore how they can reimagine train stations as community destinations rather than pass-through points. This could involve profiling the station based on commuter behaviour, adjusting the station’s look and feel, and carefully selecting retailers and other service providers in a way that aligns with the interests of the particular community. Data-driven insights can also be shared with SMRT’s partners, such as shopping centres connected to the train stations, who can also adjust their profiling and offerings to customers accordingly. This project will serve as a proof of concept for enabling their strategic planning and decision making to be more data-driven and user/community-centric.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are looking to leverage relevant existing data and create actionable insights to build and better serve communities revolving around certain train stations, through a strategic data innovation project that could achieve win-wins with other partners who already possess demographic rich data and have expertise in consumer analytics.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Land Transport, Retail

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Novel Retail Products And Service Offerings Leveraging Innovative Technologies

Through this joint innovation programme, Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are seeking solutions to support online transformation, online-to-offline customer engagement, develop a vibrant environment inside train stations to improve commuter experiences, and introduce new last-mile robotics delivery platforms for retailers and F&B merchants, within SMRT and JR East-operated train stations.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are looking for innovators to propose new retail product/service offerings, leveraging technologies or new innovations to revitalize and create vibrancy within the retail ecosystem of their train stations.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Stellar Lifestyle
Industry Types(s)	Land Transport, Retail

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Optimising Marketing Efforts Through Audience Segmentation And Profiling

This challenge is organised by Stellar Lifestyle, a business arm of SMRT Corporation Limited, with their partner Japan East Railway Company (JR East) to address challenges faced by retail and transit operators in Singapore and Japan.

Currently, Stellar Lifestyle has different pockets of data collected from various sources but face the challenge of extracting meaningful and actionable insights from the fragmented data sources. They would like to better identify trends, patterns, and correlations in the data that shape their marketing strategies and campaigns. The lack of actionable insights from the scattered pockets of data also hampers their ability to optimise their marketing efforts, target their customers effectively, and drive meaningful engagement and sales. Stellar Lifestyle also faces the challenge of limited real-time insights and data analysis, which is needed to enhance their ability to respond to the changing customers’ needs and preferences and stay competitive in the market.

What We Are Looking For

Stellar Lifestyle and JR East are looking for innovative start-ups whose solutions can leverage on existing data and capture new data sources, to create actionable insights on commuters travelling to and from train stations. Stellar Lifestyle aims to extract meaningful insights that can directly inform their marketing strategies and campaigns, optimise customer targeting, and drive tangible business outcomes.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Hospitality

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Smart Bird Breeding Monitor In Nest Box

With close to 19,000 animals across over 900 species, including 3,500 birds over 400 species, in MWG’s parks, the Animal Care and Veterinary team strives to provide the highest level of care for their animals to ensure their health, physiological, phycological, behavioural and nutritional needs are met. There is also an active breeding programme in place, with use of nest boxes for some avian species. Nest boxes can provide a safe and comfortable place for animals to lay their eggs and raise their young. Depending on the bird species, they can vary in size, shape, material, and entrance hole diameter. Nest box monitoring can also provide valuable data for scientific research and conservation efforts. However, it is challenging to monitor what happens in the nest boxes, as any human interference may result in the bird species abandoning the nest box and cause disruption in breeding.

What We Are Looking For

MWG is looking for innovative solutions that can allow monitoring of the birds’ activities and condition as well as the surrounding environmental conditions in and around the nest boxes. Activities that have to be monitored closely without human interference include identification of specific birds using the nest boxes, frequency of visitation, presence of eggs, environmental conditions, and physical health parameters (e.g. estimated body weight, estimated body temperature, respiration rate) of birds in the nest boxes.

The proposed solution should minimise as much as possible the need for humans to be near the nest boxes, and be able to alert users of any anomalies for immediate action to be taken by zoology team of aviculturists, team leaders, veterinary. Any devices used to deliver the solution should be safe around birds with strong beaks and claws. The solution is intended to be used with avian species including, but not limited to, songbirds, parrots and hornbills.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Hospitality, Urban Solutions

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Smart Detection Alerts In Horticulture Maintenance

The Horticulture Department plays a crucial role in the custody and stewardship of greenery in Mandai Wildlife Reserve to create exceptional guest experiences and conducive habitats for fauna that are sustainable and maintain harmony with nature. Daily tree inspections are part of the department’s work to maintain greenery in MWG’s four parks, with a reliance on captured images of plants and trees for diagnosis. However, the existing process is labour-intensive, time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error. The staff needs to take time from their daily work to be physically present for tree inspections and maintenance. The process is also risky as the tree canopy’s branches are high up and/or obscured and hence, difficult to inspect visually from the ground, requiring professionally trained tree climbers to check the tree parts while the arborists observe from the ground. Other challenges include inaccessible areas due to safety concerns, parallax errors/omissions due to arborists being on the ground during the inspection, and difficulty in manually photographing trees while working at heights.

With more upcoming new parks, the Horticulture Department is keen to leverage on technology and sustainable innovations to enhance productivity and efficiency in horticulture operations

What We Are Looking For

The proposed solution should provide an integrated overview of weather, site and plant growth conditions across MWG’s parks, to aid staff in monitoring, maintenance and threshold management, and planning mitigation measures.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Hospitality

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Smart Animal Body Condition Monitoring

Mandai Wildlife Group (MWG) manages world-leading zoological institutions — the Singapore Zoo, Night Safari, River Wonders and Bird Paradise — and aims to connect people with wildlife, champion sustainable living, as well as participate in and support conservation efforts to safeguard wildlife and their habitats.

With close to 19,000 animals across over 900 species in MWG’s parks, the Animal Care and Veterinary team strives to provide the highest level of care for their animals to ensure their health, physiological, phycological, behavioural and nutritional needs are met. To cater to the specific nutritional requirements for the various species housed within MWG, the team at the Wildlife Nutrition Centre (WNC) works closely with the Animal Care team to monitor the nutritional levels of each animal, ensure that an optimal diet delivery plan is achieved, and animals stay in desirable physical condition.

What We Are Looking For

MWG is looking for innovative solutions that can efficiently score the body condition of animals, so as to minimise the bias in body condition scores assessed by humans and reduce the time required for each assessment.

The solution is intended to be used for animals in the Primate (e.g. macaques and lemurs), Canidae (e.g. red dholes), and Felidae (e.g. lions) families, as well as individual species like Indian rhinoceros and Malayan tapirs. The list is non-exhaustive and may include conservation-sensitive species that may not yet be defined by standardised/recognised body condition scoring guidelines. Besides the use of images/video footage of the animals, solvers are also invited to propose other innovative methods that can be used to assess the body condition score effectively and efficiently.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Industry Types(s)	Digital/ICT, Electronics, Hospitality

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Smart Identification And Localisation Of Wildlife In The Rainforest

Mandai Global (MG), which is part of Mandai Wildlife Group, is focused on establishing and operating new lines of business and driving expansion into adjacent industries. Grounded in the Group's commitment towards animal conservation and protection of natural habitats, Mandai Global seeks to partner likeminded organisations committed to doing well through doing good.

In the development of a new eco-tourism experience in the heart of an untouched tropical rainforest in Brunei, MG hopes to offer immersive and bespoke experiences of the pristine wildlife and biodiversity in the vicinity. To curate stimulating journeys in the forest that help to cultivate a greater understanding of the species and habitat, data captured on the wildlife on site and their habits and behaviours is required. Such data should be updated in real-time in order to reflect the daily offerings, and for future planning.

What We Are Looking For

MG is looking for innovative solutions that can preferably utilise CT and ARU or other hardware arrays, as well as suitable algorithmic models, in order to survey and localise the wildlife within a tropical rainforest environment.

The proposed solution should be able to record, identify, and localise animals within a tropical rainforest. The solution is intended to be used for species including, but not limited to, the mobile and sound-producing animals of the Brunei rainforest.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium Limited
Industry Types(s)	Hospitality, Retail

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Creating A Fair Roster System That Supports Staff And Management

Yue Hwa Chinese Products is a well-established lifestyle retail store that specialises in a wide variety of Chinese products, including Chinese medicine, Chinese fashion, household items, groceries, furniture to arts & crafts. Established since 1959 in Hong Kong and 1994 in Singapore, Yue Hwa currently operates four physical outlets and one online store, employing a total of 70 staff members in Singapore.

Over the years, Yue Hwa has focused on improving efficiency by equipping its frontline staff with diverse skills to handle various responsibilities, such as cashiering, purchasing, replenishment, sales and customer feedback. This has resulted from a leaner workforce, with 40 frontline employees currently managing four physical stores and one online shop, compared to 60 employees a decade ago.

What We Are Looking For

Yue Hwa is looking for a digital tool to improve the efficiency of their roster scheduling process and enhance employees’ sense of fairness. They aim to attract and retain motivated employees in a challenging job market by increasing transparency, eliminate biases, and enhance employees’ control over their work schedules. Yue Hwa is open to exploring the scalability of the system to other companies in the same sector with potential partners.

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Challenge Owner(s)	Diageo
Industry Types(s)	Retail

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Luxury-Led Solution Elevating The Gifting Experience For Johnnie Walker Blue Label

Diageo operates in 180 countries across five regions - North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and is the world leader in the premium spirits category with brands like Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Singleton and Mortlach. Brands under Diageo are either category leaders or within top three in the premium spirits segment. In Southeast Asia, Johnnie Walker and Singleton are the market leaders in the blended scotch and malts categories respectively.

Diageo currently uses premium design boxes to protect and enhance the attractiveness of their alcohol bottles as gifts. However, these boxes are often discarded after purchase or use. As part of Diageo’s extensive sustainability initiatives through the Society 2030: Spirit of Progress plan, they have started to phase out the use of cardboard boxes and are developing solutions to promote the reuse of materials. However, they recognise that consumers still make purchase decisions based on their desire to create a luxury gifting experience for their loved ones, with ornate and beautiful packaging taking centrestage.

What We Are Looking For

Diageo is seeking a sustainable, digital and luxury-led gifting solution where consumers can be engaged through a more experiential and phygital journey of gifting, tasting, and
education, to go beyond physical transactions.

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