Financial services industry which used to be relatively traditional is in the midst of change caused by the emergence of FinTech, forcing traditional firms to improve its innovation effectiveness. There exist various studies on corporate entrepreneurship, especially on the fuzzy front-end. However, studies on the back-end phase of innovations for financial services is still severely limited. This study attempted to increase our understanding of factors influencing the innovation outcome, as well as to explore possible solutions to increase effectiveness. A total of twelve factors were identified from literature.

Through an explorative case study and practitioners interviews, the influence of these twelve factors in real-life working situation are determined. The case study was undertaken at a major European bank. Meanwhile, expert interviews were conducted with practitioners from various traditional financial services firms and the academic field. Based on the empirical result, five drivers and three barriers are identified. Several factors are quite applicable for innovation in general, although others are more specific for the financial services industry. Five improvement points are proposed based on the interviews and further literature review. This research contributes to improving empirical knowledge of factors during the commercialisation of service innovation and providing a basis for further research.

This thesis explores what it takes to make innovation at ING’s PACE accelerator more effective. PACE is ING’s innovation methodology, combining design thinking, agile working and the lean start-up approach into one whole. Within ING’s corporate accelerator track PACE is used to develop disruptive value propositions.

Case-study research shows that the eighteen weeks described in guides to develop a solution from problem exploration up until a validated minimum viable product recurrently fails to be met. A major variable affecting the development time required is the elaborateness of PACE. When joining the accelerator, a multitude of guides condense to about 150 pages on innovation in the PACE accelerator.

Twenty interviews with PACE coaches and intrapreneurs indicate that this way of describing innovative practice is too elaborate for new innovators to grasp. Intrapreneurs struggle to understand their design process as the theory seems too linear to unlock the full potential of creative divergence and to react to emerging insights from user-tests.

A literature study shows that intrapreneurial skills are vital for the effectiveness of innovation. To achieve success, intrapreneurs need to become more skilled at balancing the five design activities of formulating, representing, moving, evaluating and managing.

To conduct these activities, intrapreneurs benefit from reflexive practice on their use of innovation methodology. Based on design expertise theory, reflection on an intrapreneur’s design process allows for frequent transitions between the five design activities. By doing so, a higher cognitive level is fostered and tacit knowledge is turned into explicit learnings.

This project envisions Dash, a platform for innovation learnings, bringing:
- An integration of all PACE offerings through a visualised overview,
- A low-key way of reflecting on the design process, and
- An encouraging enviroment for innovators to share key insights

By integrating these functions in an online platform, the possibilities of PACE analytics open a new way of exploring causes of less-effective innovation. Propagating a data-driven way of measuring intrapreneurial transformation.

Although the current way of applying PACE is effective to generate disruptive solutions, its presentation through elaborate guides fails to resonate with intrapreneurial expectations. To better leverage intrapreneurial skills and make innovation more effective, I urge a personalised way of presenting PACE to allow for the autonomous design process exploration to flourish.

From here, further research is required to assess the impact of intrapreneurial reflection on the effectiveness of innovation.

In the ever changing world we live in, companies have to constantly adapt to stay relevant. More and more large organizations do this by starting up innovation hubs next to their established business. ING is one such company that has started up an hub which they call their innovation studio. ING sees this as a necessity due to developments of new technologies (e.g. blockchain and artificial intelligence) and the installation of new legislation (e.g. PSDII and MFIDII). ING’s approach to this is by setting up corporate ventures (i.e. internal and external) guided by their own method on innovation: PACE. While the innovation studio has been established, the people working there are still influenced by ING’s corporate conditions. Within the innovation studio the CINO team has observed that these corporate conditions potentially inhibit the ventures coming to disruptive or radical outcomes. The corporate conditions in this involve policies and procedures such as performance management. From this perspective, a research question for this thesis was established;

How can policies and procedures such as performance assessment, career planning and recognition be tailored to stimulate entrepreneurial behavior in corporate project teams at ING so that there is a higher likelihood of disruptive or radical outcomes.

To help structure the research and thesis, a design framework is derived from a model of organizational change called Leavitt’s diamond. This design framework consists of four components (i.e. structure, challenge, people and solution) which all connect to part of the research question. The goal in this thesis was to come to a solution by first analyzing the other three components.

First an analysis is performed to come to a fundamental distinction between two parts (i.e. corporate and innovation) of ING’s organization. This is done based on the theory of ambidexterity which states that for a company to be successful, it needs to be thrive in both exploitation of current business models and the exploration of new ones. A big difference between the two organizational parts is found in the journey an employee goes through. The exploitation part of the organization sees employees going through a linear journey climbing the corporate ladder while those in exploration go through more of a continuous process of joining and rejoining projects.

Following on this the challenge in this thesis ,performance management for innovation (i.e. exploration), is analyzed. To do this, a performance management framework is created.
By combining the performance management framework with the employee innovation journey, a matrix of micro challenges is established. These micro challenges are quantitatively tested to come to a challenge of focus of this thesis which is: “unclarity about what happens if-and when a venture ends”. It is then tested how this challenge affects the people working in ING’s internal ventures. The people working in these ventures mostly influenced are determined to be intrapreneurs. The challenge of unclarity creates an uncertainty regarding their own position with them. This uncertainty leads to them not performing optimally towards the end of their corporate venture’s acceleration and thus is likely to inhibit this process
In order to create a solution for this, a design vision is composed:

To design a solution that allows intrapreneurs working in internal corporate ventures to perform optimally by taking some of their perceived uncertainty away.

Through a synthesis, it is determined that the best way to take some uncertainty away is by providing these intrapreneurs with an opportunity. This opportunity should consist of two perspectives: opportunity to ‘explore’ and to ‘manifest’. Based on this, a framework of three boundary phases is conceived to create a concept on. This concept is developed through multiple brainstorms and eventually tested through validation with experts from five different fields. Key-takeaways from the concept validation are used to iterate the concept towards a solution. This solution, called PRIDE, intends to create a community of intrapreneurs. This community should function as both a poule of capable intrapreneurs for ING as well as a social group of them exchanging knowledge and experiences. PRIDE is established by a program consisting of three elements: onboarding, community building and innovation mobility. Facilitating this program is a digital community of intrapreneurs integrated into ING’s portfolio application. Through this, possible journey of an intrapreneur through this program could be established. PRIDE is to be implemented over a period of more than three years based on ING’s innovation strategy.