Innovation: Driving an Innovation Mindset & Velocity

We built our internal innovation ecosystem to develop the key capabilities needed for the future by leveraging the best talent and ideas from both inside and outside our company. In collaboration with our dedicated Enterprise Innovation team, our network of Travelers leaders – known as our Innovation Evangelist Network – support and champion the crafting of innovation-related objectives for their respective business lines. This network is supported by hundreds of subject matter experts, software engineers, design specialists and data and analytics professionals. These teams deploy their unique insights, perspectives and skills to bring innovative products and services to market and optimize productivity and efficiency to better serve our customers and agent and broker partners.

Through experimentation and partnerships, our innovation team supports our evangelists and other business leaders through mentoring, coaching, facilitation, tools and testing platforms. They provide:

• A best-in-class innovation methodology to rapidly bring ideas to life, supported by tools, training classes and online resources.
• Innovation designers to facilitate problem definition, information gathering, experiment design and, ultimately, the building of robust business cases for new ideas.
• A platform for rapid test-and-learn, with technology and engineers available to enable experimentation at scale, leveraging the latest software tools and emerging technologies inside and outside the company.
• Help solving critical business problems and driving velocity within our innovation agenda.

We developed tools, training, communications and events to foster an innovation mindset throughout Travelers. Notably, to elicit new ideas, we regularly host ideation events, which we refer to as “Innovation Jams” (InJams). Participants collaborate and compete over the course of 24 hours to develop prototypes that address business challenges. InJam participants include Travelers employees from the United States, Canada and Europe and span all of our business functions. The events bring together employees’ knowledge and expertise in insurance, technology, design, customer experience, marketing and communications, among other disciplines, to solve critical business problems in new and creative ways. A decade-long tradition, our annual InJam has engaged thousands of employees, inspired a number of practical solutions and led to more than 60 patent applications by Travelers. The 2023 InJam, which was conducted both virtually and in person, drew more than 1,000 employees in more than 180 teams.