Artificially Enhanced Banking

Deutsche Bank is Germany’s largest bank and has big markets in all continents. It provides wide-ranging financial services and like all financial companies is increasingly using online technology to provide these. Deutsche Bank believed they could use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their business, but did not know how and were spending a lot of money researching this. Deutsche Bank therefore chose to collaborate with Jovoto, a company providing innovation platforms, to establish a co-creation project that got the public to provide it with ideas about AI. (Deutsche Bank, 2017)

Jovoto helps organizations to innovate. They set-up and manage online spaces that gather ideas about different questions posed by organizations. By doing this, Jovoto allows brands and NGOs to carry out a ‘co-creation process’ – to brainstorm at scale and to work out design and innovation challenges with more than 80 000 creative professionals. Jovoto call this ‘crowdstorming’, essentially a form of co-creation where the public and a company collaborate to generate ideas.  (Jovoto, 2017)

How did Deutsche Bank through Jovoto carry out co-creation?

Deutsche Bank got Jovoto to create an innovation competition, challenging the public to submit ideas and offering rewards for good ideas (key resource and process). Jovoto posted the challenge ‘share your vision of how Artificial Intelligence can help Deutsche bank reinvent its customer service experience’ and promised the best idea would win awards and cash prizes – see video below for a glimpse of the challenge.

 

 

Jovoto managed this competition and vetted who could contribute ideas, making sure the input was only from professionals. Jovoto determined the institutional environment of the platform. They make clear that all users keep the copyright of their ideas.

This competition offered ‘joint profitability’, providing gains for the company and public. For Deutsche Bank, it was a way to get new ideas about AI without having to invest in Research & Development (R&D). For professionals, the competition offered an opportunity to collaborate with a multinational (which boost their reputation) and possibly to win money (customer value proposition). In reality Deutsche Bank benefits more and so it had to make the competition prize attractive to motivate people to participate.

From the information available, it is not possible to tell how many ideas in total were submitted. Deutsche Bank said they had acquired 25 good ideas, but did not publish what these ideas were. As such, it is difficult to evaluate how successful this project was.

Analysis

In general, the project seems to have worked well for Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank clearly think it has been a success, because they have since done two more competitions with Jovoto. It should be noted that even though these projects may save on R&D costs, Deutsche Bank did have to spend money to carry them out.

Based on Deutsche Banks’ case, other companies should also consider using Jovoto to set up co-creation schemes. It allows companies to generate new insights from a wide range of experts around the world. The submitted ideas are in general of high quality (feasibility requirement is met) and therefore are of great value for the company. Using conventional R&D methods (which are more expensive) companies are unable to get so many inputs of ideas or such high-quality ideas.

 

Sources

Jovoto.com (2017). Available at: https://www.jovoto.com/creatives/. Accessed on 09/03/2017

Deutschebank.nl (2017) https://www.deutschebank.nl/nl/content/over_ons_campagnes_cfo_event_de_cfo_en_innovatie.html. Acessed on 09/03/2017