Reference: 324408
Period underway: 10/11/2014 – 10/01/2017
Type: HR Funding
Amount: 94,501.60 €
Financed by: COMMISSION OF EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
Principal Investigator: Unavailable
Participants: Mula, Josefa; Rodríguez Rodríguez, Raúl; Gómez-Gasquet, Pedro
Consortium:
U. Brunel, UPV, RSA Group

Description:

The KnowNet project http://knownet.org.uk/ examines the potential of social networks as generators of knowledge in the insurance market. The concept of creating collaboration networks is particularly timely in an industry that seeks to strengthen inter-institutional links among insurers, suppliers and external agencies to improve processes, accelerate innovation, promote creativity, exchange experiences and generate ideas between the networks of suppliers. The objective of KnowNet is to develop, implement and test an interactive social network (ISN) designed to encourage innovation, and to identify where and how explicit and implicit knowledge and experiences can be shared between suppliers and their employees.An ISN will be implemented into two European companies in the insurance sector (in the UK and Spain). Experience in the UK will be supported by the Brunel University and implemented into the RSA Group by conducting surveys. Experience in Spain will be supported by the Research Centre on Production Management and Engineering (CIGIP) www.cigip.org of the Universitat Politècnica de València, which is currently selecting the insurance undertaking on which to develop the pilot project in Spain. Participation in the project will incur no cost to the Spanish insurance company as the project is to be funded by the Marie Curie programme IAPP – the 7th EU Framework Programme.

The main advantages of participating in the KnowNet project for an insurance company are:

• Obtaining the value of employees and suppliers’ usual behaviour (when using social media).
• Improving relations inside and outside the organisation, planning processes, human resources management, strategic management and change.
• Facilitating knowledge exchanges among suppliers.
• Identifying the good practices that can increase customer satisfaction.
• Exchanging experiences with the second most important insurance company in the UK (the RSA Group).
• Increasing the productivity and efficiency of internal and external communication processes in real time, smoothly and spontaneously.
• Improving the organisational environment. Partnership building and internal and external cooperation; increasing employees, supplier and customer satisfaction.
• Identifying leaders, people who have more weight in the network.
• Reflecting on the subjects that suppliers are interested in; facilitating the identification of potential partners for different projects, e.g., innovation.
• Improving strategic decisions. Reflecting on the themes of interest for each supplier, aspects that can be used to establish potential collaborations and negotiations.
• Obtaining further information about the actions to be taken by the company to improve its relationship with suppliers, and to influence them.

The time that the study undertaken at the Spanish insurance company should last about 3-4 weeks. The activities to be carried out (all by the CIGIP) would be the following:

1. Designing a custom survey to be sent to both its main suppliers of services (about 25-30) and its employees (to whom it deems appropriate).
2. Sending the survey and collecting data electronically (check an example of a survey at: https://goo.gl/hpPXrF).
3. Applying specific software to analyse interactive social networking (UCINET) to measure the degree of information and knowledge exchange both within the enterprise and with its service providers.
4. Analysing the obtained results and writing an executive report where the aforementioned benefits could be acquire.