Innovation Week to Spark Creativity & Collaboration Among Team
What is Innovation Week?
Inspired by Google’s 20 percent innovation time, at CIBC Live Labs we host Innovation Week. This innovation time takes place over one-week, once every four-months and allows the team to break into small groups and work on their own ideas for CIBC. The teams consist of multidisciplinary skillsets which include a business strategist, software engineer and product designer. Throughout the week, the teams are provided with all the necessary resources and are challenged to validate assumptions, conduct user testing, ask questions and solve a client pain point. They are reminded to keep the client first and ensure that whatever they build is desirable by clients. At the end of the week the teams pitch their ideas to a panel of critics and the winning idea is voted upon. The top ideas is added to the upcoming project roadmap and the winners are awarded prizes.

Summary
As usual, the ideas that came out of Innovation Week were creatively brilliant! Here’s a summary of the pitches:
Team The 1 — Tara Smith, Dannel Alon, Arjun Purohit
Virtual Branch Experience for Seniors
- Nudging senior citizens to start using digital channels — getting them onboard
- Helping them overcome a lack of trust and making mistakes on the computer
- Bringing the same face-to-face interaction the client would get while visiting a branch to your device through ‘The Virtual Branch Experience’.
- Easing clients into the increasingly digital world through the augmented experience.
Team Martians — Matt Vukojevic, Taraneh Ashrafi, Owen Baek
Small Business Insights
- Making data accessible, tangible and meaningful
- Utilizing the wealth of customer transaction data CIBC already collects
- Displaying geo-mapped insights to better inform small business of customer annual income, average transaction value, quantity of transactions, and other information that may impact their business.
Team Outliers — Mohammed Asaduallah, Vitaly Pugachev, Guadalupe Koen-Alonso
CIBC Smart Invest
- Clients have limited knowledge of investments and are not aware of where to look for information.
- Access to investment advice whenever you need it, even when you don’t know you do
- Quick setup of your account with a natural user interface
- Rounds up your debit transaction to the nearest dollar (or more) and automatically invests it
- Receive personalized financial advice and recommendations based on your transactions
Team NOVA — Shirin Dhanani, Jack Williamson, Sumeet Khanna
ABM Express
- Users want to decrease the amount of cards in their wallet
- Cardless banking by scanning QR codes with your mobile device at the ABM
- Authentication through mobile device eliminates the need for PIN entry
- Determine your withdrawal amount beforehand and bypass security issues at the machine
Team DigiLab — Clementia Andam, Aishwarya Kumar, John Fanjoy
C.H.A.T.
- Search queries show that users do not have a thorough understanding of the online banking site or mobile application
- Designed a digital assistant that is activated by search, and then highlights and guides the user through the process on screen
- On first time login, the assistant can give you a tour of the site
- Functionality to turn it off to avoid client annoyance but also easily accessible when needed.
The Outcome
The audience voted Matt Vukojevic, Taraneh Ashrafi, Owen Baek from Team Martians as this term’s Innovation Week Champions! Small Business Insights effectively utilized client data to provide useful insights that are valuable to small businesses. Next steps for this project will be collaborating with CIBC Data Studios to build out the prototype and conducting additional research to validate user assumptions. Another idea out of Innovation Week, CIBC Smart Invest from team Outliers, will be added to the roadmap as well to be worked on with the UX team from CIBC Digital.
This term’s Innovation Week was a huge success. Creative ideas were produced along with priceless memories and relationships for the participants!

