Innovation Booster: accelerating intrapreneurship within BNP Paribas RISK

30.01.2018

Innovation is a fundamental part of BNP Paribas’ corporate culture. This focus recently produced a unique new entity within the RISK function—an incubator for intrapreneurs. The Innovation Booster will favor the development of disruptive projects to accelerate internal innovation.

Any employee can now become an intrapreneur

Through entities such as We Are Innovation (WAI) or, more recently, Plug and Play, BNP Paribas supports entrepreneurs and start-ups working in FinTech.

For several years now, the Group has also begun to capitalize on disruptive ideas arising from its own employees. The People’s LAB in France, the Home for Innovation in Belgium, or the Lux Future Lab in Luxembourg all aim to encourage employees to set out on their own intrapreneurial adventure.

BNP Paribas RISK plays a vital role in this innovation strategy. Tasked with conducting continuous technology intelligence, the function decided to take its efforts even further by stimulating the creativity and intrapreneurial spirit of its employees.

In 2017, its Innovation Booster program got off to a successful start.

From an idea to a prototype: a selection of high-quality projects

Innovation Booster is an internal incubator open to all employees of the function. Its goal is to facilitate the process of generating ideas, drive reflection on innovative concepts and then develop the most promising ones.

All 170 applications showed the full extent of the function’s potential and enthusiasm to create and innovate. Chosen participants had the opportunity to experience a project in start-up mode:

Generating ideas: for three days, 70 employees from around the world and with various skillsets teamed up to work together on generating original ideas. Teams then translated these ideas into simplified business cases.
Incubation: five ideas were selected and available employees volunteered to spend several days at WAI to further develop the ideas.
Prototyping: Finally, three projects were presented to RISK’s top management, which approved them for the prototyping phase. Our intrapreneurs received two months to continue working on their projects.

At the end of this phase, the first prototypes were presented to management for a decision on their production.

@RT, FAMA and CSR Evolution: the Innovation Booster’s top picks

The intrapreneurs from this inaugural class worked full-time on their projects, which they thought up, structured and presented.

@RT (Augmented Risk Taking)

is an agile platform that offers a 360° vision of critical and updated information to facilitate loan decisions for corporate customers.

FAMA

leverages the digital footprint of individuals and SMEs to improve how loans are granted.

CSR Evolution

industrializes CSR analysis for more efficient ESG (environmental, social, governance) risk evaluation of the Bank’s counterparties, while enriching the detection of business opportunities.

Innovation Booster: the incubator for intrapreneurs from BNP Paribas RISK

The incubation phase is a pivotal step in any project. Coming immediately before any decision to invest in a prototype, this step serves to flesh out budding ideas.

To ensure the best chances of success to every project, Innovation Booster provides each intrapreneur with tailored support. Employees have a chance to discover new ways of working that are inspired directly from the start-up world’s favorite methodologies (design thinking, agile method, reiteration, pitch, etc.).

During this phase, each team works to define their project, notably in terms of:

Customer experience: a detailed description of customer needs and the new concept to meet these needs
Product: the first prototype, providing a concrete vision of the first versions of the finished product
Ecosystem: identifying internal and external partners, and forming the best team for the project launch
Data and architecture: description of the company’s model, architecture and target
Economic model: necessary investments, as well as revenue projections