Challenge:    I’m working as a business project manager in a large industrial insurance company.  In a top management supported project environment, my team and I are searching for ideas which  tackle our strong established, but no longer profitable, companies business model.  In times of low interest rates and therefore decreasing earnings from the capital markets, finding new  business models with higher profit margins than today, are a key success factor for insurance  companies. Gaining profits from the traditional core industrial insurance business model – based on  actuarial practice – is becoming more and more difficult, due to a highly competitive market, inefficient  processes and decrepit structures.    Selection:    I decided to choose the “Learning Launch” tool for this assignment, because my team and I have  already lots of ideas in mind to innovate our traditional industrial insurance business model (e. g.  bringing industrial insurance online relating to calculation or administration, using internet of things  technology to interconnect with our customers machinery data, etc.)    Application:    Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did and how the tool  was applied effectively or ineffectively).    First of all we convinced our top management to not to insist on us for delivering classical quantitative  business cases – which are the rule, rather than the exception in our company. Implementing a “trial  and error strategy” wasn’t easy, but the basement for our to project to use the “Learning Launch” tool.  This went along with facilitating agile project management principles instead of long established  “classical approaches”.  Starting to experiment in a traditional business like insurance industry was a long, but necessary,  process. To be honest: I took us more than a year to convince the management by several occasions,  before we could even start to do “Learning Launches”. But we wanted to avoid to do things by  half-measures.  So the first major step for the application of “Learning Launches” in our company was about creating  the environment in our company.    For our first real “Learning Launch” we invited people from the line of business where our company  has been trying to grow faster than our competitors in the recent years. We asked them for ideas  (used creative techniques in this context), created personas together with the sales department and  also together with real existing customers. For this purpose my team and I used structured interviews,  research from external sources and design workshops (supported by consulting companies).  After those steps we challenged our ideas from the first session with the needs from the personas.    Insight:    We gained several insights from the “Learning Launch” process which had a major impact on our next  steps. Not only that we discarded ideas at a very early stage, we also developed several new ideas by  involving the stakeholders mentioned above. You could say: Our customers put us on the right track.  In this whole process we promoted the idea of “failing fast but cheap” in our company. My team and I  gained additional trust, built prototypes for news products – respectively online solutions for existing  products – and also managed to developed a first system which is now in production.

Approach:    Except from the very successful first real life use of “Learning Lunches” in my company, I think there  is always room for improvement. As I mentioned in the application section of this assignment, we tried  to uphold the process mentioned by Ed Hesse in the video section it is always a big challenge in big  company to implement new ways of doing things without compromising. Next time I would definitely  using the same tool, but would spend even more time on preparing upper management. From my  point of view sensitizing for change is a key success factor on all hierarchy levels.

