In the changing industrial structure, diverse lifestyles, and increasing uncertainty, as one Group, we will continue innovating to support the well-being of all and contribute to value creation.
Takehiko Eguchi Executive Officer
What is the ideal form of the insurance industry going forward? When I joined Dai-ichi Life Holdings from another company last spring, our Group was already on the cusp of taking a big step toward answering that question. That is, the development of the Mirashiru website, which went live in December 2021, was reaching a climax.
Under the belief that we should become an industry that supports the well-being of all-their happiness and reason for living-and that offers new experiential values, and thus realizing that dramatically transforming our CX (customer experience) and EX (employee experience) based on people-centric design principles is a key challenge in this regard, we developed the Mirashiru CX Design System. We intend to continue upgrading this system as we enhance experiential values for our customers.
Another challenge our innovation team faces as we seek to contribute to the well-being of all is that of going above and beyond traditional insurance models to offer new value amid changes in the industrial structure, increasingly diverse lifestyles, and rising uncertainty around the world.
In tackling these issues, we must naturally draw on the full power of our imagination to envision what lies ahead and continue to put together strategies with single-minded determination, while at the same time we must remain agile and flexible in our approach. That is, we need to know when to bear down and when to ease up, when to persist with an approach and when to change up things.
I want to unleash the potential of every one of our 60,000 employees, including those in our overseas groups, turning them into a major source of creativity. One of our specific initiatives in this regard was to launch the Innovation Fund in fiscal 2021. We spent several years laying the groundwork for this fund, which provides funding for original ideas with global collaborative creation. This fiscal year, we will welcome people from our overseas group companies to plan and manage the fund, and to help foster a culture of innovation. We are a veritable hive of activity on both the funding and personnel fronts.
To set ourselves up for agile and flexible innovation, last fiscal year we introduced specific agile development methods, and this fiscal year we will work on making improvements in areas where issues are evident while also expanding the scope of these activities. Looking to the future, I want us to pursue our activities in a way that sets us up to go beyond just development to adopt agile ways of working and agile organizational practices that will resonate throughout the Company.
These initiatives represent a considerable challenge, but our group will continue to work as one to generate innovation to support the well-being of all and contribute to the creation of value.
Global network aimed at promotion of innovation
To identify global trends in these uncertain times, it is becoming increasingly important to build formidable networks and enhance capabilities for gathering reliable information.
To complement our organizational units in Tokyo that are specifically dedicated to innovation, we have established dedicated labs in Silicon Valley and London. In Asia, as well, we have set up sites in Singapore, Beijing, and Shanghai.
These locations are well positioned as information-gathering sites for generating innovation, allowing us to keep track of trends in advanced technologies and uncover and collaborate with start-ups in a timely manner and on a global scale.
Operation of the Innovation Fund
To improve the customer experience and realize group synergies, it is necessary to build up innovation capabilities across our Group from a medium- to long-term perspective and explore solutions that can be deployed in multiple regions.
Since fiscal 2021, we have run the Innovation Fund, which provides flexible support for demonstration experiments on a global basis, overcoming the various constraints of each group company, including overseas companies, for initiatives that benefit the entire Group.
The fund held two rounds of funding in fiscal 2021, attracting 29 ideas from eight countries. Of those, 16 passed the initial stage of selections and were presented at a pitch event where more than 130 internal and external relevant parties attended, with eight ideas ultimately being selected to receive funding support.
This initiative allowed us to evaluate several bold and disruptive ideas, and we have made great strides in realizing innovation and synergies within the Group.
Pursuing customer value via the Agile Studio
In today's rapidly changing world, companies need to understand their customers' challenges and needs and rapidly deliver value offerings (products and services) that solve those challenges. They must also continuously improve those offerings in response to customer feedback.
To enable us to see things even more clearly from the customer's perspective and continuously deliver value that truly reflects customer feedback, Dai-ichi Life has launched the Agile Studio and begun developing products and services designed with the CX in mind from the ground up. Everything starts with and is focused on the CX, from product design fully geared toward value for customers through to the development of systems for delivering that value.
At Agile Studio, we are also working to foster a culture of placing emphasis on the CX. Through customer feedback-driven efforts to improve our value offerings, we aim to cultivate DX human capital who will develop our next generation of products.
