Generali, one of the world's leading insurance companies, is stepping up its efforts to innovate for consumers’ needs and being a lifetime partner to them. Leading Innovation with a focus on investments in digital technologies is one of the three  key pillar of their “Lifetime Partner 24: Driving Growth” strategy.

“We define innovation as executing ideas to address challenges and create value,” says Filippo Maria Stefania, Group Open Innovation Manager at Generali. “Innovation can come from anywhere - both from the inside and the outside of the company. One of our mandates in the Group Innovation team is to ensure that innovation is everywhere for everyone.”

To this purpose, the Group fosters innovation by building partnerships with promising startups, funding internal innovation projects, training employees on their proprietary “we innovate” methodology, and building global innovation communities.

The Challenge

Gathering ideas, scouting partners, and bringing new solutions to market is happening continuously across the more than 50 countries globally in which Generali operates. But to accelerate the innovation process, the Group needed to better track and pool the different projects and their partners. In fact, with greater visibility it is possible to seize new opportunities to scale successful innovations.

Before implementing Bloomflow’s innovation management platform, partnerships were popping up in different contexts. We had limited visibility on which type of startup solutions were developed throughout the Group and had different sourcing processes. Now we can more easily identify synergies with other business units.

Ruth Armalé / Chief Innovation Officer at HITS Generali

“Just one example of a project that we needed to share with other business units is our Rescue Zone project. It's a project on the boating and sailing market where we bring to users a mutual assistance app that is interconnected with public rescue services,” says Didier Cadic, Head of Innovation at Generali France. “With Bloomflow, we can easily share this opportunity with the group. So it's really helping us to innovate together internationally.”

If we identify a promising innovation, we want to make it available to everyone in Generali and generate a positive impact on our business. Bloomflow supports us in this scaling process.

Filippo Maria Stefania / Group Open Innovation Manager at Generali

The Solution

Generali turned to Bloomflow as their end-to-end innovation management platform.

“All of our innovation ideas are stored in Bloomflow,” says Didier. “We assess potential projects and make sure that they come to a clear conclusion: stop, accelerated, or scaled.”

The House of Insurtech Switzerland (HITS), a subsidiary of Generali, interacts with at least 200 startups per year. “We use Bloomflow to manage our startup pipeline and visualize our innovation funnel,” says Ruth Armalé, Chief Innovation Officer.

“For those projects that are ready to scale, we make it visible for the other business units on Bloomflow.”

At a global level, centralizing information on a single platform is key to having visibility on innovation at every level of the company. For operational teams, it means they can spend less time on email exchanges and finding information on current initiatives.

With Bloomflow we have better tracking and reporting. Fewer emails. Better communication about what we are doing. And better collaboration with business units across the Group.

Didier Cadic / Head of Innovation at Generali France

Bloomflow is also used to animate innovation communities. Reports and other documents are accessible to all innovators within the organization, allowing for continuous reporting and the creation of dashboards and data visualizations. This allows Generali to gather data on their innovation activities and make informed decisions about future innovation projects.