Case Study: Great-West Life achieves company-wide employee engagement and streamlined ideation with HYPE Innovation

How a multi-line global financial services company successfully eliminated processes that wasted time, energy and money by crowdsourcing 13,000 of its employees

Great-West Life, a global financial services company with about 22,000 employees across Europe and North America, launched an Innovation Management Journey to plan, select and deploy a corporate-wide innovation management system on Microsoft Azure. The initial challenge was workforce engagement—beginning with a “name the tool” campaign for roughly 13,000 Canadian employees and smaller business-unit contests focused on “what should we stop doing” to surface ideas that reduce waste and improve the employee experience.

By adopting the Planbox ideation tool, Great-West Life replaced manual paper processes and drove strong engagement: a 13,800-person audience produced 3,350 participants, 3,070 comments, 2,170 ideas and 1,930 votes, with 11 ideas implemented so far. The platform delivered quick wins, increased leader buy-in, and established momentum for larger contests and ongoing community engagement to accelerate business outcomes.

Great-West Life

Ben Harrison

Vice President of Innovation