Story:
Allstate, the “Good Hands” Company, Takes Innovation to the Next Level

When you think of Allstate, the first words that come to mind may be “You’re in good hands.” A word that might not immediately come to mind is “innovation”. Think again!

While Allstate’s traditional corporate culture didn’t freely lend itself to employee ideation and innovation, six years ago, things changed. At that time, Allstate realized it needed to drive disruptive change to develop more competitive products and services in order to improve its position in the marketplace. “With mature products and services and strong competition, the insurance space was ripe for disruptive innovation,” explained Matt Manzella, Allstate’s Director of Strategy and Innovation Services. “Our employees are passionate about our success; we knew we just had to provide a creative way to engage them to address our biggest challenges.”

Here’s how Allstate did it.

First: Carve out a space for innovation…

In 2006, a 2,000ft² Innovation Lab was built to harness the creativity of employees and facilitate testing of promising concepts. The sun-lit Lab, centrally located on the Allstate campus, was filled with whiteboards, toys, books, games and the latest and greatest technology gadgets and software to engage employees in innovation.

Second: Accelerate innovation through rapid prototyping and simulation…

To help accelerate the incorporation of innovation into Allstate’s core values, an Innovation Team was formed. Tasked to provide services across the Allstate group of companies, the team’s goal was to break free of traditional IT-constrained development processes and, instead, enlist employees in innovative, rapid prototyping of solutions that addressed broadly defined business challenges and opportunities

Third: Deploy innovation tools, leveraging social technologies to improve idea-sharing and make them accessible to all…

It became evident that the Innovation Team’s one-on-one ideation meetings with employees weren’t working as well as they could. Great ideas were unearthed, but there was no effective way to capture and broadly share these ideas and develop them into actionable projects. They needed a system that was scalable and allowed for easy administration. Leveraging new social technologies, the Innovation Team worked to create a process to define “innovation as a service” using SpigitEngage ™. “Our mission is to engage our employees to help solve Allstate’s biggest pain points,” explained Mr. Manzella. “Spigit allows us to extend our innovation efforts beyond a one-dimensional wiki approach and create a scalable living, breathing social ideation hub. We knew that the more people we got involved, the more robust the ideas would be. We wanted to encourage employees to participate in the process of making our company better and giving them a voice in that process.”

The Innovation Team developed a consultative approach, collaborating with an internal “business partner” to crowdsource ideas focused on the specific problem each partner wanted solved. The ideation events are known internally as a “Blitz”, and typically lasts 10 days.

Next: Take full advantage of employees’ diversity of experiences, skills and values…

The Innovation Team stages up to three Blitzes per month, engaging over twenty business partners with various backgrounds and experiences within Allstate. Each partner is put through a vetting process, ensuring that the business partner views employees as a viable source of ideas, a challenge has been identified that is meaningful and will resonate with employees, and that the partner has the capability and the funding to move promising ideas forward. For several weeks prior to a Blitz, the Innovation Team indoctrinates business partners so they can run the Blitz on their own in the future. During this process, they identify a core team to manage the Blitz, including key stakeholders, and develop a detailed communications and marketing plan for the Blitz.

Allstate’s first Blitz challenged participants to create a mobile app to engage Allstate’s employees or customers. Participants were asked to determine the ultimate functions and features of the app. The Blitz, involving over 1500 employees, produced hundreds of ideas, 19 of which made it onto the Allstate mobile roadmap. These ideas helped shape the application into what it has become. Just two years after launching its innovation program, Allstate had received over 2,500 ideas and had successfully implemented numerous ideas. In addition to the mobile app, ideas ranged from employee recognition concepts and claims process improvements to new products and services.

Finally: You’re in good, “innovative” hands with Allstate…

Realizing the value that innovation has generated internally, Allstate plans to explore a similar innovation community for its customers. If Allstate, an 80-year-old company in a conventional industry like insurance, can make huge steps towards making innovation their competitive advantage, your organization, too, can elevate innovation to the next level.