Great-West Life’s Innovation Management Journey

Great-West Life, a global financial services company, sought to create a culture of innovation to support its transformation from a product-focused company to a customer-focused one. The company embarked on an innovation journey to select and deploy an innovation management system built on Microsoft Azure. The company found that big-name software solutions were priced too high, and opted for Planbox due to its flexibility and budget. Great-West Life views innovation across three buckets: core, adjacent, and transformational. The company is adopting a crawl/walk/run approach to ideation, launching a couple of challenges to engage employees and build innovation management capabilities internally. Results depict high engagement, around 25%, with the potential to expand and launch larger initiatives in 2017. The most exciting part of the journey has been the implementation of 11 ideas so far, and the creation of a more loyal following within the organisation.