“Innovation” is a word used so often there is a danger that its true meaning can get lost. Not everything new is innovative, while innovation is about more than just the latest tech.

At the recent GBTA Convention in San Diego, Yannis Karmis from BCD Travel talked to tnooz about how BCD defines and positions innovation.

As its executive vice president of product strategy and development, his role is about identifying customer needs and bringing new products to market. Tech clearly underpins a lot of its new solutions, but he was keen to point out that innovation can come from a number of different departments:

“Innovation isn’t just about a new technology, innovation can happen in service models, in financial models and elsewhere.

“A lot of the investment in our hotel platform is based around marrying up modern technology with new go-to-market models, new financial models, new partnership models.

And to execute that, you need developers, you need marketers, you need financial employees and operational staff, all with the mindset that there is an opportunity to work different, more intelligently to bring something truly innovative to our clients.”

The partnership model mentioned above is based around BCD’s acknowledgement that “we’re not going to be great at doing everything ourselves so we need to be able to bring tech companies and startups into our environment.”

This February it launched Solution Source as a marketplace for third party tech tools which can integrate with the core BCD platform.

Karmis explained:

“BCD has always worked with third parties…and what we’ve done with Solution Source is formalise that integration – think of it as an App Store environment – externalising our APIs and services in a more structured way so that we can work with third parties at scale, with better standards in place, better security, better controls.”

Here’s the 10-minute interview in full:

To view other tnoozLIVE@GBTA interviews, click here to see the playlist on our YouTube channel.