Allianz Worldwide Partners: Global Innovation at Scale
A pilot with 25 senior executives became a six-week global innovation competition involving 400 leaders, with several ideas receiving recognition and funding from the Global Board.
Executive Takeaways
- A focused executive pilot can establish the tools, language and evidence needed before innovation is opened to a larger global community.
- Combining facilitated learning with a digital platform allowed ideas to be captured, refined, assessed and progressed through one connected and collaborative process.
- The program produced several ideas that received recognition and funding from the Global Board, alongside many other initiatives progressed at country and local levels.
The client and strategic challenge
The formation of Allianz Worldwide Partners (AWP) brought together several Allianz operations to create a growth platform spanning insurance, assistance and membership-based services. Its activities crossed established industry boundaries, including travel, roadside, home and internationally mobile customer services.
The leadership challenge was to build collaboration and innovation across the newly connected global group. AWP wanted to tap into expertise distributed across countries and business areas, while responding to commoditisation and technological disruption.
The Allianz Global Head of Innovation selected Blue Ocean Strategy Australia's proposal to design and run the first AWP Innovation Academy program.
The proposed solution
BOSA proposed a digital innovation hackathon that combined online and face-to-face experiential learning, live commercial challenges, the IdeaScale collaboration platform and access to Blue Ocean Strategy facilitators.
The design treated innovation as a connected system of people, process and platform. Participants would not only generate ideas; they would develop business models, test assumptions, assess proposals against shared criteria and create a path towards implementation.
- Executive education grounded in Blue Ocean Strategy tools and questions.
- A digital environment for sharing observations, developing ideas and voting.
- Facilitated team work on live innovation challenges.
- A structured pipeline for assessment, funding, team formation and execution.
The executive pilot
The pilot brought together 25 senior executives from ten countries across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Before meeting face to face, participants worked through brief innovation and collaboration challenges using concise pre-reading, webinars and a customised IdeaScale community.
During a three-day workshop in Paris, two BOSA facilitators guided four teams as they developed and presented business models and four leading ideas.
Participant feedback rated the process highly as one they would recommend to colleagues. The BOSA facilitators were described as “world class; amongst the best we have seen anywhere in the world.”
Scaling to a global innovation competition
Following the pilot, AWP extended the model to a selected community of 400 senior managers through a digital innovation hackathon built around three challenges.
BOSA and the program team refined the platform using content and ideas from the pilot, prepared engagement and education material, and trained moderators to improve submission clarity and participation. The Allianz global board received updates as the competition progressed.
Over six weeks, short webinars and teleconferences were delivered across time zones. Blue Ocean Strategy-based tools, question banks and meeting agendas helped team leaders explore opportunities and identify the actions required to clarify, develop and validate ideas.
Managing ideas beyond the brainstorm
IdeaScale was used to capture, refine and vote on ideas, but the program did not stop at participation. Expert panels used structured selection criteria to rank proposals for final committee review.
The platform also supported the wider innovation pipeline: business modelling, funding rounds, execution-team formation and project management through to commercialisation.
This made the digital component more than an ideas box. It connected engagement with governance and created a visible route from an initial proposal to an investable initiative.
Outcomes
The leading ideas were presented to the Allianz Global Board. Although the original plan was to fund three, four ideas received innovation recognition and funding.
Somewhat unexpactedly, several other initiatives were progressed at country and local levels through the engagement that had been created with regional and local leaders. Interest also spread beyond the selected AWP community, with leaders from other Allianz divisions exploring how the model could be applied to their teams.
- 25 senior executives participated in the initial cross-country pilot.
- 400 senior managers joined the scaled digital innovation competition.
- Four ideas received innovation recognition and funding from the Global Board.
- Many other initiatives progressed at country and local levels.
- Further innovations emerged from executives and divisions outside the original group.
The transferable lesson
Innovation programs should never separate education, idea generation and implementation. This case connected all three. A small pilot established the working method; the digital competition broadened participation; and the assessment pipeline linked ideas to decisions, funding and implementation teams.
For global organisations, the lesson is to design scale deliberately. Technology can widen participation, but it needs a shared strategic language, active facilitation, credible selection criteria and an implementation path if engagement is to produce more than a list of suggestions.