To remain relevant and mitigate disruption, traditional companies have to engage in multiple fast-paced experiments to produce digital offerings: revenue-generating solutions that leverage digital technologies to address customer needs.[foot]Learn about producing digital offerings in J. W. Ross, M. Mocker, and C. M. Beath, “Rethink Your Approach to Digital Strategy: Experiment and Engage,” MIT Sloan CISR Research Briefing, Vol. XVIII, No. 10, October 2018, https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/2018_1001_DigitalStrategyEvolves_RossMockerBeath.[/foot]
To drive their digital offering experiments, companies are investing in corporate accelerators, establishing digital innovation labs apart from company headquarters, appointing a chief digital officer or creating similar roles, and increasing hiring of digital talent such as coders, data scientists, and design thinking coaches.
However, global reinsurance giant Munich Re found that these types of efforts didn’t produce sufficient momentum for the company’s digital offering initiatives, because all the initiatives experienced similar challenges around three key resources: funding, expertise, and technological capabilities. In this briefing, we describe how Munich Re became a serial innovator of digital offerings by building a foundation to address challenges that were common across initiatives.[foot]This research briefing draws from MIT CISR’s full Munich Re case study, N. Fonstad and M. Mocker, “Munich Re: Building a Foundation for Innovating Digital Offerings,” MIT Sloan CISR Working Paper, No. 445, August 2020, https://cisr.mit.edu/publication/MIT_CISRwp445_MunichRe_FonstadMocker.[/foot]