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 – supports and champions the crafting of innovation-related objectives for each of our 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 Enterprise Innovation team supports our evangelists and other business leaders through mentoring, coaching, facilitation, tools and testing platforms. The team provides:

• 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 that leverages engineers, the latest software tools and emerging technologies inside and outside the company to enable experimentation at scale.
• Help solving critical business problems and driving velocity within our innovation agenda.

We continue to develop tools, training, communications and events to foster an innovation mindset throughout Travelers. Notably, to elicit new ideas, we host an annual ideation event, which we refer to as “Innovation Jam” (InJam). 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 lines and functions. The event brings 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. For more than 11 years, our annual InJam has engaged thousands of employees, inspired a number of practical solutions and led to 90 patent applications by Travelers. The 2024 InJam, which was conducted both virtually and in person, drew more than 1,250 participants and involved more than 220 teams.