About
Liberty Mutual’s Innovation Experience Program is a unique development opportunity where employees gain hands-on innovation experience by spending 3 months in Liberty’s enterprise incubator, Solaria Labs, and take back learnings to their core teams.
Innovation presentation
Liberty Mutual’s enterprise incubator, Solaria Labs, has been running a quarterly employee rotational program to expose Liberty talent globally to an immersive, hands-on innovation experience with our incubation team. Employees from across Liberty Mutual go through a selection process to work with the incubation team full-time and meaningfully contribute their expertise to an incubator project for 3 months.
While in the program, employees have access to other learning opportunities, including design thinking and hypothesis-based testing interactive bootcamps and curriculums. They learn how to define a problem, conduct interviews and research, and identify pain points and insights. They also learn how to brainstorm and prioritize solutions, build out a solution concept, and design an MVP-style experimentation plan. We consider these skills fundamental to Liberty’s journey to rapidly understand and react to industry change.
Rotators are exposed to how the Solaria team incubates and tests new concepts in-market and are encouraged to network and expand their connections across the organization. These employees bring their business expertise and passion for innovation to Solaria’s incubation efforts. For example, an employee with expertise in the property adjustor process helped build the Recover + Rebuild center on our Liberty+ platform.
Our latest cohort includes employees from across a variety of functions and backgrounds: Claims, Distribution, Technology, Product and Experience. This diversity allows us to shape more well-rounded incubation solutions and get early feedback from our business partners. From an employee point of view, participants praise the cohort approach to the program since it helps them adjust to the rapid pace and open culture of the incubator. It also allows them to expand their networks within and outside the lab.
The Innovation Experience Program started small with only a few employees per year, but with positive feedback, Liberty Mutual’s evolution to a more digital and hybrid work environment, and leadership support, we’ve been able to grow and expand the program to be more inclusive to our global employee population and unlock undeployed expertise. To date, nearly 200 employees have graduated from the program. We’ve created a strong alumni network of innovation champions as graduates continue to share their learnings with their core teams across the enterprise.
Uniqueness of the project
Liberty Mutual’s Innovation Experience Program invites employees to immerse themselves in the innovation process, getting exposure to a startup-like environment within a Fortune 100 company where new ideas and perspectives are welcome. While working in Liberty’s enterprise incubator, Solaria Labs, employees build experimentation skills and learn new ways to apply their expertise to solving problems.
