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To remain relevant and mitigate disruption, traditional companies have to engage in multiple fast-paced experiments in digital offerings—revenue-generating solutions to what customers want and are willing to pay for, inspired by what is possible with digital technologies. After launching several digital offering initiatives, reinsurance giant Munich Re noticed that many experienced similar challenges. This case describes how Munich Re addressed these common challenges by building a foundation to help its digital offerings succeed. The foundation provided prioritized and staged funding; dedicated, hands-on expertise; and a digital platform of shared services. By 2020, this foundation was helping to support over seventy initiatives, including several that were in the market generating new sources of revenue for the company by enabling its clients—insurance companies—to better service their own customers.
This research briefing describes the organizational capability of scaling at scale, which we define as enabling multiple digital innovation initiatives to realize bottom-line value from their innovation by leveraging shared resources. We illustrate this concept with a case study from global multi-energy company Repsol, which implemented scaling at scale to cultivate a portfolio of more than 450 initiatives and helped over seventy percent of initiatives to reach the scale-up stage. As a result, over five years Repsol realized €800 million of bottom-line value from digital innovations.
To generate greater value faster from digital innovation, many companies are increasing how much they learn from their own innovation efforts. However, in many companies, these changes are limited to one stakeholder group: innovation teams. Two other stakeholder groups, senior executives and experts from corporate functions, also need to learn from digital innovation initiatives. We have defined three learning imperatives that address a company’s needs to learn continually about building (1) a successful innovation, (2) a portfolio of initiatives that realizes strategic objectives faster, and (3) shared resources that propel multiple initiatives. All three imperatives involve collecting data regularly from digital innovation initiatives. In this research briefing we outline the three learning imperatives and provide examples of how companies are pursuing them to achieve strategic objectives more effectively and efficiently.