John Kellington, Senior VP and CIO at The Cincinnati Insurance Companies

How do you determine whether or not an idea is worth pursuing?  

“Here at Cincinnati Financial we’ve started something called ignITe, using crowd-sourcing within the organization to gather ideas. I, along with my director team, will review ideas sourced from our organization to decide which ones to pursue. We’ll then take a small, highly specialized team and then allow them to dedicate the time to see what might happen – a fail early type of thing. We’ve had some very good successes come out of it; advanced portal design, speed to market of products and big data concepts. The whole idea is to give our people the space and ability to innovate. We often say, ‘wisdom is in the crowd,’ so within the organization we are also assembling groups of developers and challenging them by saying, “here are the technology streams we’d like you to try, outside of that, make it business worthy.”