Cases

Achmea is a top 3 Dutch insurer. It grew by acquiring diverse Dutch labels and is proceeding with this strategy in Europe. A result of such a strategy is a large number of divisions, operating companies, brands, and staff departments that are all used to operate autonomously.

One of the wishes of the board was to get people to connect more between these entities and to share knowledge.

Innovation Factory was asked by Achmea Innovation Center of Excellence to facilitate this process.

Creative City Lab stands for a world of innovative and sustainable solutions and collaboration. The foundation Creative City Lab is a joint initiative of forces from the corporate world, government, knowledge institutions and the creative industry. The goal is to realise societal and economical developments in a sustainable manner, through collaboration with all parties involved. Creative and sustainable solutions for urgent and complex issues are being developed and realised in this unique, open and innovative initiative. Over a period of half a year, 25 carefully selected top students will work together in multidisciplinary teams on their assignment. These students are guided by innovative parties from business and the creative industry. During the project, collaboration between the business world and the creative industry is essential.

In February 2009 UPC (a Liberty Global Inc. company) launched UPC Fiber Power, providing incredible internet download-speeds of up to 120 Mbps. The introduction in the Netherlands would be followed by introductions in all other UPC countries. UPC management approached Innovation Factory with the request for a way to involve the employees throughout Europe in celebrating this important milestone. Innovation Factory proposed to host an Idea Challenge.

Eurocross Assistance is a division of Achmea Eureko. For the past 26 years, it has been trend-setting in providing assistance throughout the world, such as medical help, breakdown services, but also assistance in the sphere of fire damage, storm or water damage and personal emergency services.
In the summer of 2008Eurocross decided to replace their outdated knowledge management system. They chose to use a wiki because of the following reasons:

Enterprise Wiki: changing the way we share our knowledge at work

One of the objectives in the new strategy of a Dutch semi-government organisation was to promote openness. The problems that arose when looking at the openness within the organisation were based on the storage and sharing of knowledge, and the communication between coworkers.

Some of the challenges the organisation faced were:

• The limited possibilities of the current intranet.
• The need for an easy way to share and store project information for IT project groups.
• The problem of keeping tacit knowledge that is lost when knowledgeable workers leave the company.