Building a Repeatable Healthcare Venture-Building System
\ CASE STUDY
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
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"We knew alignment was the problem. What we didn't know was where the capability gaps were against the bets. INSI located them — and what to invest in stopped being a debate."
— Diana Benli, Chief Product Officer, Cognizant TriZetto
Background
TriZetto, a Cognizant company, provides technology and services that support health plans and other healthcare organizations. Its leaders could see significant opportunities emerging across artificial intelligence, workflow automation, platform modernization, and new healthcare business models.
The challenge was converting those opportunities into scalable growth. Strong ideas emerged across the enterprise, but they moved through different teams, planning cycles, investment standards, and operating structures. Promising concepts could stall between initial interest and commercialization.
With C\R Strategy Partners, TriZetto created the THRIVE (Zero-to-One) Innovation Incubator to close that gap: a structured venture-building system designed to move healthcare ideas from validation through acceleration, market testing, and operational integration. The incubator provides the governance and operational structure required to accelerate, evaluate, and launch cutting-edge healthcare IT concepts.
The Challenge
TriZetto had substantial market insight and domain expertise. What it lacked was a consistent system for turning that knowledge into evidence-backed investment decisions and commercially viable ventures.
1. Fragmentation: Innovation activity was distributed across teams with different priorities, processes, and decision criteria.
2. Velocity: Customer and market signals were not consistently translated into product decisions at the pace new opportunities required.
3. Decision clarity: Ownership, governance, and escalation paths became unclear when opportunities crossed products, platforms, services, or business units.
4. Evidence: Ideas entered the pipeline with uneven problem definition, market proof, evaluation standards, and investment readiness.
5. Leadership capability: The incubator staff and cohort teams needed greater comfort with ambiguity, experimentation, rapid learning, and course correction to move ideas through the program effectively.
Our Approach
C\R Strategy partnered with TriZetto to design and establish THRIVE as a repeatable innovation-to-commercialization system. The work combined venture design, program operations, governance, evidence-based evaluation, and leadership development.
The work followed four connected phases:
1. Validate: Design and run a structured incubator that tests customer problems, opportunity-solution fit, proof of concept, and business potential before major investment.
2. Accelerate: Create a defined path for selected concepts to become MVP-ready solutions through rapid iteration, technical design, and AI-enabled development.
3. Lift: Prepare ventures for market testing by clarifying the buyer, value proposition, measurable outcome, commercial model, and proof required for investment.
4. Integrate: Establish the governance, operating practices, and internal capability required to transition validated ventures into the broader business.
C\R Strategy also embedded the Innovation Navigation Styles Inventory (INSI) into THRIVE at two levels. For the incubator staff, individual assessments and a team readout identified strengths, blind spots, decision patterns, and gaps affecting how the team coached participants and ran the program. The findings informed team pairings, stage gates, facilitation, and coaching focused on speed, creativity, calculated risk-taking, and distributed ownership.
For cohort teams, INSI became part of the incubator journey rather than a standalone assessment. Participants established a Week 1 starting line tied to the program’s four stages, used their profiles to anticipate how they would respond to invalidated ideas, team conflict, feedback, and uncertainty, and identified the behaviors they wanted to develop by Demo Day. Follow-up assessments and change-over-time readouts compared their starting and ending patterns, making individual development, team dynamics, and the effect of the incubator visible.
Learning & Outcomes
The engagement produced more than an incubator curriculum. It gave TriZetto a clearer operating model for deciding which ideas deserved investment, what evidence teams needed to produce, and how leaders should support innovation work.
• Shared model: THRIVE established a common four-phase pathway from early validation through operational integration.
• Program readiness: The team designed a 16-week incubator structure with defined stages, learning outcomes, schedules, roles, and participant materials which was subsequently reduced to 12 weeks with AI prototyping.
• Decision discipline: Governance frameworks, evaluation rubrics, roles, and review points created a more consistent basis for advancing, revising, or stopping ideas.
• Evidence quality: Teams were expected to validate the customer problem, market need, solution fit, proof of concept, and business potential before seeking larger investment.
• Incubator-team development: INSI revealed how the staff’s customer focus, resilience, and adaptability supported THRIVE, while identifying a need for faster learning cycles, bolder experimentation, greater creative range, and less dependence on consensus.
• Cohort development: INSI gave participants a starting-line reflection, development goals, and change-over-time readouts. In the January 2026 cohort, the follow-up showed greater focus, analytical depth, and complementary team behavior while maintaining a strong customer orientation.
• Learning culture: Alpha delivery was treated as a test-and-learn cycle, allowing the team to improve the curriculum, facilitation, governance, and operating model before expansion.
The Results
By the end of 2025, TriZetto had built and tested the first stage of THRIVE and established the foundation for a broader venture-building system. Through 2026, they independently ran and scaled their first three cohort program cycles. THRIVE is heavily leveraged to bring enterprise-grade AI and automated solutions to the TriZetto Healthcare Products Portfolio, optimizing how payers and providers manage core operations. A major milestone tied to this incubator infrastructure includes the cross-functional coordination and rollout of the TriZetto AI Gateway (TAG), which embeds advanced compliance-ready intelligence directly into healthcare claim workflows.
As the program gained momentum, each output directly addressed one of the five original challenges:
1. One innovation pathway established: To address fragmentation, TriZetto created a shared THRIVE model connecting validation, acceleration, market lift, and operational integration.
2. A repeatable incubator put into operation: To improve velocity, the team completed the program design and introduced a structured 16-week path for moving ideas through customer discovery, solution fit, proof of concept, and business development.
3. Governance and ownership clarified: To improve decision clarity, the engagement defined roles, a hybrid operating structure, decision checkpoints, and governance frameworks for program and investment oversight.
4. Evidence-based evaluation embedded: To raise idea quality, TriZetto adopted a validation arc, evaluation rubrics, and documented review criteria that made learning and investment readiness visible.
5. Innovation capability strengthened across staff and cohorts: To address cultural and leadership barriers, INSI was embedded into both incubator operations and the participant journey. Staff used team diagnostics and coaching to improve facilitation and decision dynamics; cohort teams used starting-line reflections, individual and team readouts, and change-over-time analysis to build self-awareness, complementary ways of working, customer-centered judgment, and greater adaptability.
TriZetto emerged with a tested incubation foundation and a clearer path for converting enterprise opportunities into validated ventures. With C\R, TriZetto received a system which consistently produces MVP-ready concepts, credible market evidence, and investment decisions that lead to commercial scale.