Challange
FairVentures Innovation Lab, the innovation arm of the c. $12bn Canadian Fairfax Financial group, were looking for specialist insurance innovation insights and a structured approach to innovation portfolio planning.
For them, this was about helping benchmark their innovation activities against their peers, but also to help them better understand the innovation portfolio across their group businesses, and where there might be any gaps.
Solution
FVLab used Ninety’s Idea Pulse report and dataset for a group-wide innovation portfolio assessment.
FVLab kicked off the exercise with a senior partner from Ninety providing background and summary of the Idea Pulse report, an overview of the methodology, and highlights of the findings. FVLab wanted to replicate aspects of Ninety’s research as part of an ‘internally focused’ assessment of Fairfax companies innovation efforts. The objective was to understand commonalities across the group, the individual companies, and the overall group’s position across the ’10 types’ versus the market.
Having a single framework to use across the group provided FVLab with an easy way to compare and distill those common themes. FVLab used the Idea Pulse framework to survey companies, summarize results, and compare against the industry benchmarks and examples in the Idea Pulse report.
Benefits
FairVentures was able to quickly and cost-effectively understand the current innovation landscape and use insights and data to plan a competitive approach to their innovation portfolio. They were also able to engage companies in the group in the planning activity through a common framework and set of exercises.
“Being able to leverage the work Ninety did saved us tremendous effort on industry research alone, and further, having access to Ninety’s database of industry examples allowed us to provide relevant case studies as part of our discussions with Fairfax companies. Overall, we were able to identify and prioritize a number of key themes for companies to target, and for the Lab to explore and co-develop solutions.”
Dave Kruis, Director at FairVentures
