Progressive Insurance revs up IT-enabled innovation

Some of the best business ideas were dreamt up in a garage--Hewlett-Packard and Harley Davidson, Disney and Mattel, Amazon and Google.So when IT leaders at $18 billion Progressive Insurance wanted to foster that kind of inspiration among the company's 26,000 employees, they launched the Business Innovation Garage (BIG). A resource that's available to help employees test innovative ideas, the garage is staffed by a manager and a rotating group of "mechanics"--IT analysts, system engineers and dev