Allianz Trade
How Allianz Trade funds the innovation customers actually want
Allianz Trade, formerly Euler Hermes, had spent two years pushing innovation from the bottom up. It worked too well. Projects multiplied across more than 50 countries, and the company had no shared process or guidelines for evaluating this kind of early, unproven work.
No way to kill a project.
You've seen this pattern. A company opens the gates to bottom-up innovation, and ideas pour in faster than anyone can judge them. Without a way to fund the proven and stop the rest, every project survives by default. Teams kept polishing initiatives no one had tested with a customer. Resources spread thin across zombie projects no customer had ever asked for, long after they should have been stopped. Allianz Trade had the innovation energy. What it lacked was the governance to point that energy at the ideas that worked.
A higher bar at every gate.
We took the pipeline they already had and gave it three gates, each tuned to how far an idea has come. Stage one is Spark: anyone can put up an idea and get a small Innovation Box, about 1,000 euros and three days, to shape it into a pitch. The local board judges idea potential and strategic fit, with the local CEO as sponsor, and calls it the same day. Into the next stage, pivot, or stop.
Stage two is Sprint, where customers decide. The team gets eight weeks and a coach to win real traction, then pitches a regional board that scores how customers actually responded. Stage three is Scale: a viable business model, paying and repeat customers, the real unit economics, judged by the group board. Each gate asks for harder proof than the one before.
We stood up the local, regional, and group boards, then rolled the model out market by market, starting in northern Europe. Each region now runs four to eight live projects through the same three gates, and the weak ones get stopped early, at the cheapest stage.
Now ideas proven with customers get the money.
Projects everywhere, no filter.
No way to tell which deserved funding.
Zombie projects drained money and focus.
Funding follows customer proof.
Three gates, idea to paying customers.
Weak ideas stop early, 4 to 8 live per region.
Now an idea only moves up when it clears the gate for its stage, and each stage asks for harder proof: Spark wants a real customer segment, Sprint wants traction, Scale wants paying and repeat customers. Everyone knows the bar before they start.
Local, regional, and group boards now run in the European markets, starting in the north. A weak idea dies at the Spark gate in a day, before it ever costs real money. The teams that reach the funded stages are the ones already out talking to customers.
“We benefited from a depth of innovation expertise we had not found with our other partners.”
Ruurd Vander Veen, Digital Transformation Director, Allianz Trade
Legacy The governance framework became the standard for innovation as it rolled out across the European markets. Local projects line up with global strategy, and the zombie-project problem is gone where it runs. Good ideas climb the gates to funding; dead ones stop at the first.