Pulse: The new ideation platform for ING

Abstract

The financial industry is changing rapidly, therefore innovation is key. This also counts for ING, the largest financial institution in the Netherlands. ING’s purpose is to empower people to stay a step ahead in life and in business. This purpose is maintained throughout the bank by making innovation part of their main strategy: going beyond banking, disrupt core banking and moving towards being a platform where banking is one of the essentials.
There are although some hurdles to overcome. ING can roughly be divided in the Retail and Wholesale Bank. Within ING, the Chief Innovation Office is responsible for the innovation strategy as a whole and the initiatives with a Horizon 3 and Retail background. Next to CInO, there is the Wholesale Bank Innovation Office, who is reponsible for the innovation strategy within the Wholesale Bank as well as the Horizon 1 and 2 initiatives with a Retail background. This project is conducted from the WBIO.

Innovation within ING is mostly about creating new ventures. These could be home-grown initiatives or external FinTechs where the ING Innovation Fund has invested in.
Venture building is relatively new to ING, the goal of the WBIO is to have launched 50 ventures in 2020. There is only one problem: there is no continuously filled innovation funnel. The innovation funnel represents the initiatives divided over several stages according to ING’s innovation methodology PACE. In order to keep the innovation funnel constantly filled, a natural inflow of ideas is necessary. Therefore the ING problem statement is defined as follows:
Find a solution to generate a continuous input of ideas from employees within ING to keep the Innovation Funnel constantly filled.

In the disovery phase, a deepdive is made into the topic of this thesis: ideation. First a company analysis is performed where innovation within ING is being researched. The innovative entities ING has built can be divided in 4 different categories: the PACE methodology, CInO and WBIO, Intrapreneurship and the Agile transition ING has started in 2015. After the company analysis is performed, the qualitative research started. After a qualitative research is done by interviewing several stakehoders within ING according to ideation and innovation. Also observations are done in three different kinds of ideation sessions.

The qualitative research phase brought several insights behind the problem of a discontinuously filled innovation funnel. These insights were integrated further on in the design statement from where the development phase started. Innovation and ideation is although communicated top-down still not embedded enough in organisational culture. Innovation projects are for instance not recognized enough by some departments, employees feel a bit anxious and sceptical towards the big changes the bank is going through and although employees would like to be a part of innovation within ING, they are often not sure how to. Observations of ideation sessions however showed how much participants like to do something else than their daily job and how surprised they are with their creativity when stimulated the right way.

The Design Statement is therefore formulated as follows:
I’m going to design a solution for ING employees that will enhance their creative capabilities and that will provide the inspiration to change their mindset that is necessary to perform ideation, so that the innovation funnel will be continuously filled.

From the Design Statement, the ideation phase of this design project started. Four different ideation sessions were conducted with ING teams, SPD students and individually. The common outcome of these ideation sessions is that innovation should be made tangible to the ING employees. Innovation and ideation should be brought into their own ciricle of influence. The second important outcome was that innovation should come from intrinsic motivation and passion. When being passionate about a project, employees are willing to take the next step and come up with creative solutions.
From these insights, 2 concepts were created: Meet & Match and Inner Circle of Innovation. Validation with end users was done to define that the Meet & Match concept was chosen as most favourite. One design iteration was done to create the final concept: Pulse.

Pulse is the new ideation platform by ING. The goal of Pulse is to make every ING employee part of innovation in an approachable way in order by inspiring them through creative facilitators, generated ideas and fellow passionate colleagues.

The main elements of Pulse are existing from an application and a meetup, where the to be hired Ideation Lead will facilitate ideation meetups. The topics for these ideation meetups are initiated by Pulse members, the ING employees. These topics could be anything: from a deeply rooted internal problem to an uncovered client need. The Ideation Lead will make sure that ING’s strategy and value spaces are maintained and select the right topics for the sessions. Ideas generated in the meetups will be uploaded back on the app where other Pulse members can react and apply for the follow-up session.

In the end Pulse will make sure that innovation is approachable to all ING’s employees. It doesn’t matter whether you are an innovation driver or a complience manager; the common sharer is the passion or interest for a certain topic.
Further research should be done in orther to expand Pulse into a complete intrapreneurship platform. The follow-up session after the ideas are generated is an aspect that should be looked into furthermore to create one platform for ideas and the people within ING that would be interesting to develop this idea into a valuable venture for ING.

Innovation within ING is something that is in constant motion, and they are definitely not the only corporate. This graduation thesis can be seen as a case study for ideation optimization and employee engagement within innovation performed at ING.