Shaping the Future. Together.

Abstract

Digitalization is a phenomenon describing the increasing use of information and communication technologies in our society as at large and in our daily lives. They reshape the world around us, how we organise our lives, how we interact with friends and family, and how we work and collaborated. Digital technology makes us more connected and more insightful.

Because of digitalization companies like Achmea experience increasingly dynamic markets. Many markets already have experienced significant change, such as the logistics and entertainment industry. The financial and insurance markets are experiencing that change right now. Start-ups working on ‘Insurtech’ and ‘Fintech’ are hot and booming.

The Assignment
The assignment for this project has been to develop methods for Achmea IT in order to stimulate technological innovation across Achmea. The solution is a strategy called ‘Shaping The Future. Together’ and is meant to align existing innovation processes by creating shared vision about the future among employees.

This strategy is an answer to the several problems found during research; (1) the lack of understanding new technologies and its potential by the employees at the divisions and the brands, (2) the struggle to imagine and develop an IT infrastructure that is ready to support new innovations based on new technologies, (3) the lack of governance on innovation processes across Achmea and (4) the lack of a proper process at the research side of innovation.

The strategy is designed for Achmea to innovate with digital technologies. It empowers employees to come together across Achmea and collect insights about the future to imagine visions - new interactions between people and products. These visions guide, inspire and steer innovation at Achmea.

‘Shaping The Future. Together’ means connecting different innovation processes within Achmea together. Different processes work together in an iterative (Agile) and open (open innovation) manner to generate knowledge about the future. This is done by doing tests in innovation funnels, generate concepts during hackathons and imagining desirable futures for people and Achmea.

Innovation funnels, Customer Arenas, Hackathons, Innovation challenges, Trend reports and whitepapers are structured in a comprehensive way to organise a strong overall innovation process within Achmea and its ecosystem. This innovation process generates knowledge on new value propositions, new business models, new products and services, new business processes, new ways of collaborating and the future state of the IT infrastructure, see figure A.

Workshop
Except for the creation of visions, most processes are already present within Achmea. Therefore, a custom workshop has been designed for the innovation managers across Achmea. This workshop generates visions with employees on a specific topic. During the workshop these visions are mapped on a timeline to create a path towards the future.

The visions are based on insights, data, knowledge and personal values the participants have to collect upfront. These insight can be collect from anywhere; whitepaper, family and friends, experiences, customer research and business analytics. This approache is grounded in literature and argues that futures are created by the action people take based on the knowledge they can muster and the value they have.

The workshop has been tested with employees of Achmea and is used by innovation managers at the Innovation and Experience centre IT. The pilot was a success. The energy was high and the participants were impressed about the deep discussion the workshop facilitated. In only four hours they managed to make multiple visions for the future.

The strategy, innovation process and workshop is based on a combination of different approaches; Innovation of Meaning (Verganti, 2017), Vision in Product Design (Hekkert & Dijk, 2011), Contextmapping (Sanders & Stappers, 2012), Backcasting (Vergragt & Quist, 2011) and the Three Horizons Method (Curry & Hodgson, 2008).