Incubating an in-house innovation team

Pacific Blue Cross is a unique non-profit insurance company—and British Columbia’s #1 health benefits provider. To stay competitive with truly member-centric digital experiences, they focus on three elements: the way their interfaces are designed, the way their systems are architected, and the way their teams are structured.

After successfully tackling interfaces and systems, PBC realized it was time to focus on the third element: team design. To achieve truly long-term, sustainable success, they knew they needed to reduce their dependency on third-party vendors, and increase their capacity to innovate in-house.

The first step was embedding Domain7’s project teams alongside PBC, as we continued to deliver work within our existing partnership. While we participated in sprints to ship new features and deliver new products, we were also demonstrating our methods. We used agile processes while helping PBC learn and adopt their own agile processes. And as we conducted user experience activities like experience mapping and persona creation, we shared our frameworks and helped PBC adopt user-centric ways.

Through the service design process, a clear idea emerged: create a new Innovation Team. This would be the first-step foray into what it could look like for PBC to plan, strategize and execute innovative technology projects, independently.

The shift in digital capabilities unlocked more than just a better user experience at PBC: it unlocked the opportunity to develop and deliver all-new products, thanks to a newly empowered team.

“PBC has a new capacity to be able to do things they haven’t done before, or haven’t been able to do nearly as quickly before,” Mark describes. “In a sense, that unlocked a lot of potential that was just waiting to be leveraged in the organization.”

As with any organization that fully embraces a user-centric way of working, the shift influenced how PBC strategizes, delivers value, and innovates. Ultimately, the time spent to achieve alignment and understanding paid off in some impressive changes: the team shifted their technology, the way they worked, and even their team makeup. PBC, through a process of capacity-building and organization design, is up and running with a strong, sustainable internal innovation team.