Ben Telfer: 

Hello everyone. Hope you’re doing well and welcome to today’s ICMIF webinar, “Fostering a culture of innovation”. Today we’ll here from US ICMIF member EMC Insurance Companies on their innovation journey and how it has transformed the culture of the organization.  

I’m pleased to hand over to two of EMC’s innovation team Jason Gross who’s VP of innovation and Angela Noble who is AVP of innovation. Jason, Angela thank you for joining us today and sharing more of how EMC have created a culture of innovation. Jason I will hand over to you. 

Jason Gross: 

Thank you Ben and thanks everyone for joining us today. EMC has been a long–time member of ICMIF and really proud to be able to continue to share with our fellow ICMIF members on our personal innovation journey. Some of you may have actually been on a webinar last September on our innovation journey. We had the chance to present with another ICMIF member from France. We got a nice overview of where EMC was at that point and I’m going to take a couple minutes to review where EMC has gone on our innovation journey, but then really focus on the cultural piece. Because without our efforts to foster a culture of innovation throughout our organization, we wouldn’t have the success that we have seen over the last couple of years. 

EMC is headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, and last year we wrote about US $ 1.9 billion. We are a multiline property–casualty insurer focused on insuring commercial enterprises. We go to market through independent insurance agents in the U.S. Roughly 40, 41 states is our focus. That said we have a growing EMC national life organization and of course our EMC reorganization writes reinsurance really across the globe and has been very active in ICMIF over the last few years. When we got our start here in Des Moines writing workers compensation over 100 years ago, we now focus on not only the small risks, but also much larger risks to our largest book of business is insuring cities, municipalities, schools, both primary and secondary. And we have about 2,400 team members. Half of those here in Des Moines working virtually and then the other half through our branch offices throughout the Continental U.S. 

I’m going to start in a way talking about our culture. EMC has five core values. These have been true to our organization for quite some time and these like so many other organizations, these don’t change. These are the things that we believe are absolutely bedrock and core to who we are as an organization. And I’m really, really proud to say that last year innovation was added to this list. So when we started our journey several years ago we made innovation and fostering a culture innovation one of our multi-year strategic priorities. We’ve had so much success in that space that I’m so proud to now say we’ve actually transcended it being part of our strategic plan and now say it’s one of our core values as an organization. But it didn’t happen just by chance. So, today we do have a dedicated team of five. Angela Noble is going to be joining me here in a few minutes to talk about part of our journey. But we’ve been very active in the insure tech space, with over 400 in the pipeline that we manage ourselves. Over 24 commercial agreements. We’ve made equity stake investments in a number of companies as well and very active in a number of accelerators and incubators around the U.S. 

We’re also very proud and a bit humbled by some of the recognition that we’ve received for these efforts, including recognition from Plug and Play last year and more recently a sister to ICMIF, the NAMIC organization here in the U.S. gave us two best in category in their annual innovation awards. So very proud of the progress we’ve made. But how did we get there? Well when I talk about the innovation journey and really the culture of innovation, I was trying to think how do I even define what that means? And many of you online are probably already familiar with the new A.M. Best assessment and their document called scoring and assessing innovation. Whenever I read through that document the first time was they talk about the inputs and the outputs and how they’re planning on scoring carriers on their innovation efforts, I thought it was really significant that even A.M. Best recognized that culture was a core input into how can you measure a company’s innovation success. 

I’m not going to read through this slide, but this is taken right from that scoring and assessing innovation document. If I had a chance to write this, I don’t know that I could have written it any better myself to really enforce what are the key aspects that EMC has tried to make as our priorities on our own journey. Things like leadership support. Things like taking risks and recognizing that failures are things to be learned from, not to be feared. That at the end of the day all employees need to be included and incentivized to participate in that innovation journey. 

When I talk about innovation more broadly I talk about the four phases that we went through, like the multi-stages of grief or any journey that we go on. EMC four or five years ago was very much in that 1.0 phase which I like to call chasing the shiny objects. Every carrier has to decide when are they going to get in this innovation, this insurtech game that is absolutely changing our marketplace and changing how we go to business. So there can oftentimes be a lot of excitement about all the new technologies, all the insurtech companies and I know the first time I went to some of the insure tech conferences many years ago I was just like a kid in a candy store. There were so many cool technologies that I thought I just want to do all of this. 

Well, as fun as that is, let’s face it we can’t do all of those things. One of my favourite quotes is, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” So the next part of the journey when we went to innovation 2.0 I like to call that the projectization of innovation. So that’s when you start to really get serious and say you know what, we can’t chase all those shiny objects. What are the things that we’re really trying to accomplish? So that includes maybe hiring an innovation leader. That’s where EMC was three years ago when they hired me and we started to build out a team to make a very strategic and intentional approach as to how we were going to engage in innovation and these new technologies that were changing our marketplace. 

We started to create repeatable processes. So by that point we had already done a few proof of concepts and even a couple pilots with insure tech companies. But it seems like every time we were doing one we were recreating the wheel. So part of that projectization is creating those processes. The first time we tried to map out with is our proof of concept or pilot process look like? I think there were five or six steps. Today, we’ve matured to the point where that process is over 30 steps. So we know who to go to and who to engage from a corporate security standpoint and data security standpoint. Who’s going to be engaged in reviewing contracts and on the implementation side. So really making sure that you have a structure and you start to have a list of what are your priorities? What are the problems, the business opportunities that you’re really trying to solve for? We were only able to do that by starting to engage a larger audience. 

If it was just this team of now five people on the innovation space at EMC trying to do everything, we wouldn’t be very successful. It was really how are we getting our business units to buy in and support and start to embrace the changes that were happening, not only across the industry, but also at our organization as well. The next phase where we’ve been maybe the last year or so is I like to call the path to ROI. I wish I could say innovation 3.0 was actually realizing a return on our innovation investments. But let’s face it, so often in our business there is a significant lag between when we make an investment, when we make a partnership, when we put a new product in the marketplace before we truly realize all the potential benefits because of regulatory, because we don’t just roll out new products in all of our states all at once. We iteratively roll things out. 

But when I say path to ROI it means that we now have enough pieces in our pipeline. We have implemented enough tools and we have enough other new tools and processes at the various stages of implementation and we have started to build out, what are the tools that we’re going to use to measure the success? So are we seeing the results that we thought we were going to see when we put together the business case to implement a particular solution? So we’re very optimistic we’re going to start seeing even more tangible results and get that return on that innovation investment. But it’s also very critical to set realistic expectations. It would be very easy to have a senior executive get so excited and over promise and under deliver on innovation and insure tech engagements. There is a lot of promise for not only a cost savings and improvement to the bottom line. There is a lot of opportunities for top line growth and using these new technologies as well. But we also have to be very realistic that it will take time and it will take an investment, perhaps multiple years before we actually see all of that return. 

I think EMC today is actually starting to move into what I call innovation 4.0 and that is path to integration. Let’s face it, many of us companies are still on legacy platforms, legacy technologies. I know EMC is going through our digital transformation where we’re going to a completely cloud based API driven architecture for our policy systems, claims and billing. But that takes many years to get all of that through. I look forward to the day where we can literally just plug and play new tools, almost like with an app store environment. We want to start using this data source. We want to stop using that data source, because that’s been one of the biggest hindrances and challenges to so many carriers in adopting innovation is it hasn’t been easy to integrate new tools, new data sources into their legacy platforms and systems without doing a whole bunch of coding and very manual processes. 

So I look forward to that opportunity to be able to truly plug and play and some carriers are closer than we are. We also think that we’re also ahead of many others as well and really go into that new modern architecture that’s going to also allow us to hedge against some of the risks. I know probably many of you, we certainly felt that way about should we be engaging with start up companies that may not be around in two years, three years, five years because so many new technology companies just don’t last. Or should we be developing that in house? Well by creating an architecture that allows you to easily integrate and change and pivot that speed to market, we believe is going to position us to be able to have that flexibility going forward. 

So, what does culture have to do with all that? We recognize pretty early in our process that as exciting as the new technology was and the promises of insure tech, everything from IOT devices and the automation of RPA and other artificial intelligence tools and just opportunities to really leverage not only the data that we already have available to us, but new data sources as well. That was all great and very exciting. But we also have a very tenured workforce. We have been doing things the way we’ve been doing them for a very long time and unless we actually make sure that our organization, our culture employees were ready to embrace that change and look forward to that change that we weren’t ever going to be able to get that ROI. Because I don’t care how exciting that new product, that new tool is, if it’s not going to get used like so many things it’s going to sit on the shelf and collect dust. 

There are really four areas where we believe a culture of innovation has helped to enable our success. The first one has got to be around the collaboration. I’ve just personally seen in my 20 plus years working our industry too many teams, whether it’s an innovation team or an IT team or some special team that works off in a garage lab type space, come up with all kinds of cool ideas and then go to their business partners and look and say, “Hey look what I built for you. Isn’t it awesome? Well you’re welcome.” Too often the business partners say, “Okay, thank you. Not really what I asked for. I really just want one of these.” So collaboration, working with our business partners from the get go. Having buy in from all parties up front has not only increased the engagement across our organization, it’s also helped really with the retention as well. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had very tenured employees come up to me and say, “Jason I have never felt this inspired, this engaged, this excited about our company and our industry as I do right now and I’m so proud that EMC is out there being a leader in this.” You’ll hear in a minute from Angela some of the things that we’ve done to help inspire and to engage our team members to make sure that that collaboration is starting to happen. The second thing is around priority transparency. Here again too often innovation teams are segregated from the rest of the organization. That also creates distrust. They’re working on their thing. We’re working on our thing. But by working together to say, “What are the solutions that we need to work on now?” Not necessarily because we’re trying to bring it to market now. But we need to start understanding how are things like block chain or autonomous vehicles going to impact us, our agents or our policy holders in the future? 

So it’s finding that nice balance between solving for the solutions of today, but also to inspire, to educate and think about the opportunities of tomorrow. The third is learning from our failures. Let’s face it, saying no to something or shutting something down after you’ve already invested countless dollars and man hours into a new initiative can be very frustrating and very difficult. But, we have certainly felt and learned the hard way, and in a good way that we have to learn from our failures. Steve Jobs is famous for saying, “If you’re not failing, you’re not innovating.” We’ve certainly had our failures. 

Two quick ones I’ll share. Early on EMC was very bullish on telematics and how it might be able to improve risks and for fleet managers, for commercial fleets. We still think there’s a lot of opportunity there. But we went really far, really fast with a telematics program and got out ahead of really where the ROI was. So why we ultimately decided to pull back on that particular telematics solution, we’ve been able to learn a lot from that whole experience to make sure that we have the right tools, measures in places for future initiatives. And it’s causing us to rethink how are we viewing our relationship with our agents and policy holders with some of these new technologies including telematics? 

Another failure I’ll tell you about real quick. There was a data provider company that we were also very bullish on and very excited about. It had a lot of shiny object bells and whistles and I’m like, “Ah, this is really cool.” We did a very exciting pilot, but also we ran the product on an existing book, an existing set of accounts that we had put through a similar process. When we interviewed everyone, everyone’s like, “Oh, this is so cool. This is so great. It’d be wonderful to have.” But as part of our due diligence we worked in this step to say, “Okay, well if we had this information what would we have done differently on that existing book?” Almost across the board the answer from our team members was, “Well we wouldn’t have done anything differently. We still would have done the same decision, made the same decisions that we already did. But it would have been really nice to have that extra data.” 

Well that extra data was very expensive. So if we realized if we’re not actually going to be changing our business processes and making better business decisions, then it was just paying for some shiny objects that we really didn’t need. So that’s the first learning. The second learning then is it gives us an opportunity to step back and say, “Well should we have? Are there opportunities for us to re-evaluate the questions that we’re asking, the decisions that we’re making based on existing data and how can we learn from that so that we can either retool our own process or make better decisions with these solutions going forward.” 

And then finally having a culture of innovation has really helped enable also a spirit of intrapreneurship at our organization. Let’s face it, in so many legacy organizations and maybe mutual and cooperative companies suffer from this more than some others. But, oftentimes our team members don’t always feel like they’ve been hurt or maybe they feel like they’ve made suggestions but nothing ever happens with them. So through this fostering a culture of innovation we’ve tried to open up channels for our team members to make suggestions on process changes, on new ways of doing things. We’ve held some contests called pitch your awesome ideas where we’ve had team members submit their ideas and have the opportunity to pitch them in front of a large part of our organization. There are three that were pitched this summer that we’re actively pursuing right now and that is just so engaging and empowering for our team members to say my organization listens to me and my organization is doing things with the suggestions that I’ve been able to make. 

So those are just a few ways that we feel having a culture of innovation has helped enable some of the success that we’ve been able to see over the last few years. Now I’m actually going to turn it over to Angela Noble who is our AVP or innovation at EMC to give you four examples of some culture building initiatives that we’ve done over the last few years. Angela? 

Angela Noble: 

Thank you Jason. Hello, my name is Angela Noble. I am the AVP of innovation at EMC Insurance Companies. I lead the innovation team as we execute on initiatives that help create a culture of innovation at EMC. What I’ll describe to you today will tie in nicely with everything that Jason has already described. Next slide please. While we’re waiting for the next slide, at EMC we are not only focusing on what’s happening in the industry as Jason talked about, but we’re building a culture of innovation from within and we’re doing this in a variety of ways. 

Today I will be sharing four examples of internal innovation with you. This slide lists out the four initiatives that I’ll tell you about today. We’ll talk about programs called Innovation for Breakfast, Pop-Up Innovation Labs, Emerging Issues & Trends Councils and our Cross-Enterprise Innovation Team. Next slide please. Thank you. 

First up is Innovation for Breakfast. Innovation for Breakfast is a monthly series that we launched in 2018 that raises awareness, it generates excitement and promotes participation in innovation at EMC. Each event is live streamed to all EMC team members from around the country. We record each session and post them on our internet site to ensure all team members can access the information. And you’ll notice some statistics in the blue box on the right. Since 2018, 35 insure tech companies have pitched to our company. 57 EMC team members have shared updates about the innovative work that they are doing in their roles. 32 EMC leaders have lent support to and provided insight into the innovation journey at our company and 14 industry experts have shared knowledge about trends in our marketplace. That is just a few of the highlights as you can see. 

This program draws a few hundred team members each month. Originally it was live and in person and now we have taken it 100% virtually to all of our team members. We reach many others that can’t make it to the live event through our communications before and after each session. In fact, we’ve created 79 internet articles related to Innovation for Breakfast over the last two years and those articles communicate the topics we’re covering and the speakers that we’re featuring each month. Next slide please. 

Next up, I’ll share about our Pop-Up Innovation Labs. The Pop-Up Innovation Labs at EMC provide hands on opportunities to our team members to explore and research new technologies, inspire and educate leaders and team members about emerging technologies and recommend innovative and technology and cultural solutions for EMC and for our agency partners. Now I should say that hands on has taken a different meaning with the onset of COVID-19. Prior to COVID we had a dedicated lab space in our corporate headquarters where lab members would meet daily for a period of four to six weeks. With the onset of COVID EMC team members in the lab began working from home. So the lab went virtual with them. We have been able to successfully complete two 100% virtual labs with team members who dedicate a daily portion of their time to exploring, researching and recommending technical and cultural solutions for EMC. 

So far we’ve hosted nine labs. You’ll see the list on the right side of the slide. At the end of each lab we host an open house and the last few have been virtual. And the open houses provide an opportunity for all EMC employees to hear the results of the lab. Next slide please. Thank you. 

Next up is our Emerging Issues & Trends Councils. So with Emerging Issues & Trends we know it’s really important for us not only be aware of what’s happening in the industry, but to make recommendations on what EMC should do to stay current. In 2018 we created four teams: internet of things, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and black chain. These groups are made up of team members from around our company. They’ve researched trends and share their findings to our company leaders and with our team members through updates in our labs and our Innovation for Breakfast events. These groups were all volunteers. They represented eight different business units and they focused on collaborating and creating a lot of inspiration around their topic focus areas. Next slide please. Thank you. 

Last our Cross-Enterprise Innovation Team. This team is made up of a representative from each business unit at EMC. We knew it was very important to include others on our innovation journey. We need their insights and experience and expertise to shape the direction of EMC innovation journey. So the Cross-Enterprise Innovation Team or what we call CEI for short, focuses on four p’s. The first is developing and maintaining a pipeline with information about the insure tech companies we’ve discovered. The second is working with senior leaders to define departmental innovation priorities that will help guide us and focus our efforts as we find innovative solutions that align. The third is working together to select insure techs for pilots and ensuring that these decisions align with EMC corporate and business unit priorities. And the fourth is getting innovative solution into production. It definitely takes a team effort from across multiple business units to do so. And with that next slide please. 

That’s an overview, a few examples of what we’re doing at EMC to support a culture of innovation and now I’ll turn it back over to Jason. 

Jason Gross: 

Thank you Angela and really let me say publicly thank you to her and our entire team to pull off those events and so many others. They’ve really worked so well together to engage our team members from across our country, from across our organization and I look back on how far we’ve come just in the last two, two and a half years. I’m very proud of the engagement that we’ve had from across our organization. That’s why I’m going to close our prepared comments with just maybe five factors that we felt are critical to successfully building and fostering a cultural of innovation. 

The first one is executive leadership support. Now, probably not a surprise to anyone. You read any article on innovation and insure tech on fostering a culture and they’re all going to say leadership support is absolutely critical. I like to call it visible, local and vehement executive support. We would not have gotten as far as we have without support from our CEO, our executive vice presidents and on down throughout our organization. The leadership support has absolutely been critical. It’s been visible. They show up to Innovation for Breakfast. Even if they are not part of the program they are oftentimes just in the audience and that’s been so important for fellow team members just to see, “Wow if my CEO is taking time to be a part of this just sitting in the audience, it helps me feel like this is some place that I should be as well.” But they also have to be vocal and be champions for talking about the changes that are happening across our company, across our organization. They really have to make sure you hear from them and our new CEO Scott Jean is just a great example of what a vocal executive in the innovation space looks and sounds like. 

I also think you need to have vehement executive support as well. There really has to be some passion about it. I’ve seen too many organizations just give lip service to innovation and say, “Oh, yes we have someone doing that. Yes there’s a team doing that.” They really have to be vehement in being a champion for the change that is happening here again in our carriers with our distribution partners and also with our policy holders as well. I’ll never forget the first time I brought a group of our senior executives out to say Plug and Play tech center in Silicon Valley. I was actually starting to wonder are there investments in some of these accelerators and incubators, are they still worth it? Now the world’s changed. We’re seeing plenty of deal flow. People now know EMC and quite frankly they come to us. We rarely need to go to them. But there’s so much that we’ve been able to get through our partnerships, not only Plug and Play, NAMIC, ICMIF across the organization. 

But I brought some executives out there and at the end as we were driving back to the airport, this is pre-COVID of course I said, “Well what do you think? Is this something that we should continue doing?” Every single executive in the car said, “Absolutely. We are 100% behind this. We’re going to continue to make the investments because we realize that we’re in this for the long haul and if we’re not going to make these investments then we might as well just pack up shop and head home.” Of course we’re not going to do that. We’re committed to our policy holders and our agents and that executive support has been absolutely critical. 

The second thing is the engagement and the includement of all team members. If you notice there was a theme through all of the examples that Angela mentioned and even through the four phases that I mentioned earlier. We talked in every single step about how we’re engaging and working with our fellow team members. We believe in internal crowd sourcing. So every lab, every breakfast the Emerging Issues & Trends Councils, we open those up to anyone in the company to apply to be a part of. Partially because we want to make sure we have a diversity of voices that people have the opportunity to feel included in what’s happening across our country and our organization. But also because we want to make sure we are tapping into what we believe from the get go would be hidden talents and interests of our team members. With 2,400 employees, we knew that we probably had team members who went home at night and maybe they reeked out flying drones or maybe they really got into wiring or building a smart home with all sorts of sensors and devices where they could control everything from their phone. 

There’s a lot of passion out there about how these technologies can change and impact our lives. We wanted to tap into that. So that’s why each time we’ve put out a call for volunteers to be a part of our labs or our councils. We’ve always had more interest than we’ve had spots to fill and that has been just so engaging. I’ll even go back to our very first Pop-Up lab when we explored virtual reality and augmented reality applications and insurance. I mean that was just so mind blowing to so many people that conservative old EMC was exploring virtual reality applications. It was so much fun to just turn that team loose to go out and play with and explore and understand how that emerging technology might impact and change how we go to market. How our agents interact with us and certainly how our policy holders can learn or mitigate risks.  

And it was just fun to see the ripple effects throughout the organization. Because team members would go into the lab for a couple hours and they go back to their teams and their team members say, “Hey wait. What did you guys do today?” “Oh, it was so cool. We got to do all these amazing things.” That ripple has really helped open people’s minds and eyes as to what EMC is trying to do. 

The third thing you’ve heard me talk about it already, but the importance of collaboration and ownership. I put the greater than sign, but it really leads to the other. The example I gave earlier the innovation teams can do so much, but we also only have so many resources. We can’t build a new product and take it to market. We need our underwriters and our field organization. We can’t come up with a new fraud detection solution for claims and do it ourselves. It’s got to bed done from the business units. In fact, I even tell Angela and the team that there will be no successful pilots that come out of the innovation team. It’s because there’s a recognition that successful pilots come out of our business areas. Yeah we do most of the work. We do the facilitation, but the business leadership and their teams have to be involved from the very beginning of the identification of the problem or the solution, the opportunity all the way through the selection of a tool or solution and the implementation and the beyond. Because here again they’re the ones that have to live with it. They’re the ones that have to use it, otherwise we’re not going to realize that return on that investment. 

Number four, solve known problems, but still educate and inspire about the future. I think almost every speaker on innovation over the last few years has referred to the Harvard Business article with the little matrix that shows core tangential and transformational innovation. And we certainly follow a portion of that at EMC as well. We have to be able to solve known problems. You’re not going to be able to get additional investments and really change that culture unless you get things implemented. Yes it’s fun to talk about the future and all the new technology and all those new opportunities. But if you’re not actually solving problems for your team members, for your agents or your policy holders, you’re only going to be able to get so far. So make sure that you’re solving known problems. 

But, we also have a responsibility I think to educate and to inspire about the future. When we started that first lab on virtual reality and augmented reality I had several executives say, “Jason why are you bothering with that? That technology is so far out there, why are we even wasting our time with it?” Well by going through that lab experience and having some of the leaders literally put on headsets and see what a training program might look like for a claims adjuster or what it might look like to walk through a building that had been ravished by a storm or a tornado from the safety of a conference room. All sorts of light bulbs starting going off and they started to realize, maybe that technology actually isn’t quite so far out there as we thought it might be. That there are actually applications that we should start investigating and pursuing today. And we’re still working on a couple of the things that came out of that lab two years later which I’m very proud of. 

And finally you need to have passionate, patient and persistent innovation leadership. Whether that’s a dedicated role or roles like Angela and myself or other folks as part of your leadership team, you have to have champions. You have to have folks that are going to be passionate about what’s happening across our industry. You have to be patient because these things don’t happen overnight. I tell insure techs all the time as much as it sounds great that maybe we can meet in the morning or see a pitch in the morning, have a meeting afterwards, do a proof of concept by noon, have a pilot in the afternoon and have a paid contract and go to implementation by seven o’clock at night. Doesn’t happen that way. It can sometimes takes weeks, if not even months to go through that very simple process before you even get to implementation. So you have to be patient in understanding not only that our business partners are going through a lot of changes as well. So timing is absolutely everything. But that’s why we also have to be persistent. 

Sometimes as innovation leaders it might look like we get to do all the fun stuff and play with all the new toys. But the fact is we’re also trying to change a company and an industry that is already changing. It’s happening and it’s up to us as innovation leaders, whatever your title is, to also be persistent in recognizing that you have a choice right now. You can sit on the sidelines and watch these changes, watch the disruption happen in front of your eyes, or you can be part of the game. It’s not going to happen in the next three months, six months. Hasn’t already happened. This is a journey and it’s going to be a long journey that’s going to continue to see our industry evolve and change over time. And I’m happy, proud that we are taking steps to be part of that journey and would welcome any questions, conversations that our fellow ICMIF members would love to have about how your fostering or can foster a culture of innovation at your organization as well. So Ben I’m going to turn this back over to you and say thank you very much, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions as well. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank you very much Jason and Angela for a really interesting presentation. I really appreciate you sharing your successes, as well as your learnings and those failures that you’ve seen along your journey. And also some really great practical examples of what EMC have been doing to foster a culture of innovation. We do have a few questions in. So I will pose those to you and Angela now.

First question of Jason or you Angela, was there any catalyst for the change of the culture? Was this something that was external or internal or combination of both? 

Jason Gross: 

Yeah I think it was a combination of both, Ben. I think it started with a recognition. Maybe about five years ago that technology, that the disruption that happened in so many other industries was coming to insurance as well. So even before insure tech was a thing, I think a number of our senior executives were following what was happening in fin tech and really use that as an inspiration to say, “Hey EMC, are we going to sit on the sidelines or are we going to get into this game?” So it was really one or two executives that very early on decided, “You know what, we don’t know where we’re going to start or how we’re going to start, but we need to start something.” So we started small. We created a strategic analytics department. Hired our first data scientist to start to understand what are some of the AI and analytic opportunities to better utilize the data that we already had. 

I mean what organization hasn’t felt like they’re data rich in knowledge for, that’s certainly been us at times as well. But it also said we see really interesting things happening with companies starting to invest in companies. So, we made our first investment about I’ve years ago. We started to join these accelerators and we’re very fortunate to be in a wonderful community of Des Moines, Iowa which is one of the insurance capitals of not only the country, but we like to think the world. So we started getting involved with the global insurance symposium, which is an annual conference held in Des Moines every April that really brings carriers and regulators and solution providers together for a three day thought leadership discussion. Then we also created in Des Moines, the global insurance accelerator which was the first start up accelerator in the world focused solely on insurance type solutions and EMC was an early investor and member and continues to be to this day of the global insurance accelerator. So there is definitely the external inspiration with some internal catalysts as well. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank you Jason. A related question and the question starts by commending you on your journey and it shows that you’ve been recognized with the success from your peers and fellow insurers. Are there any factors that have led to EMC becoming an industry leader? You may have touched on these already Jason, but perhaps you can say some more. Things like talent, perhaps even your mutual structure, the existing culture and then the profile of some of your leaders and board members. 

Jason Gross: 

I appreciate that, the recognition. Like I said we’re very humbled by it. We didn’t really expect to be recognized for our innovation efforts at this point in our journey. But it’s not why we do it, but it’s still rewarding both personally and professionally to see the results of your efforts coming together. So a couple thoughts in particular. Starting with that corporate leadership, we have been a mutual company. We did have a publicly traded entity here in the U.S. for quite some time, but we recently went back to being a solely mutual private company. We actually feel that that has given us some flexibility that maybe some other companies haven’t had because we absolutely take the long view on what’s best for our agents and for our policy holders that I don’t think we would have that same latitude or support if we were a publicly traded company in the U.S. So that’s been absolutely one of the bedrock foundational things that has helped enable our success. 

Even from our board of directors. So when we made our first investment in an insure tech entity, our board actually was very supportive and really maybe even pushing a little bit to say we created a portfolio so we had a means and a mechanism to be able to invest in insure tech companies. We certainly would not have been able to do that with the support at the very top, even with our board of directors. And quite frankly, they have loved whenever we’ve been able to go in and share updates with them about what we’re doing with new technologies, emerging technologies and even some of the success that we’re seeing with some of those companies that we have invested in that are bringing new tools and solutions to market. Then that’s really been that thread that has tied in what we’ve been doing in the innovation space and what we’ve been seeing and the support we’ve been having from our executive leadership. 

One quick example, we were a very early investor in a company called MakuSafe. They’re actually based in Des Moines, Iowa. The founder is actually a friend of mine who I knew before I even got to EMC. He created a company to improve the lives and safety of manufacturing workers. Because his dad was a safety manager at a manufacturing plant and he was having a beer with his old man one day, kind of came to this realization that if employees were wearing sensors, some type of wearable IOT device, that that data could actually help people like his dad improve the safety and the lives of those workers. Well Make You Safe is now an absolute leader in workforce wearables with an armband device that detects everything from stressful movement, noise, temperature, stress. It allows for the recording, almost like a black box type experience that an airplane might have so that whenever there is an incident all the data can be immediately sent directly to the safety manager to say, “Hey here’s what was happening in that environment.” 

We’ve gone through multiple successful betas and pilots with them where we’ve already identified countless times where those devices have actually helped us mitigate what otherwise might have been a pretty serious injury to a knee or a back or whatever. Make You Safe is now starting to go global. They have their first installation happening I believe this month and because of COVID and those sensors being able to detect where a worker is in a particular building, they’re now applying social distancing algorithms to help plant managers understand where do they have bottlenecks or places where team members have more challenges with that social distancing. So by engaging our team members in that process through MakuSafe is really helped bring it from the top all the way down through our organization. 

Ben Telfer: 

Excellent thank you, Jason. Angela I’m going to come to you for the next question as it relates to your pop-up labs. How do you decide on the topics? Are these crowd sourced like other aspects of EMC in terms of how you decide the topics for your Innovation for Breakfast and any pop-up labs? 

Angela Noble: 

Sure, absolutely. Thank you. What we do actually we do a lot of discussion behind topics. The discussion generally starts with our innovation team, so Jason mentioned that we do have five people on our team that are dedicated to innovation 100% of the time. We will, we will brainstorm. We will talk about the topics that we are hearing from our business partners, from our industry connections of what is most important or what will have the most impact at EMC? We generally start with a list and we will get together and it used to be in a room with a whiteboard and Jason has definitely led the way with the whiteboarding. We love it. Now we’re virtual and we do virtual discussions to decide which topics come next. But yes, we involve our team members and our leaders in all of those discussions and in those decisions. Going to them and saying, “Hey we’ve narrowed the list down and we’re thinking about focusing on AR, VR for our next lab.” Or our most recent one was diversity, equity and inclusion. So we get people’s input on when we’re deciding and get their confirmation and their buy in before we dive into our labs and that includes gaining buy in from executive sponsorship. 

So each lab has at least one, most of the time two executive sponsors who say, “Absolutely I’m committed to this topic. It’s important to our company. You have my absolute support.” So that happens in the labs. For Innovation for Breakfast that’s also definitely something that happens in our team. Brainstorming sessions, but we’re always reaching out to EMC team members from all different business units to ask them what’s most important to them. Ask them for updates on the things that they’re leading within their business units to make sure that we’re choosing topics that are most meaningful. Jason anything to add to that? 

Jason Gross: 

Thanks Angela. Maybe one thing I will point out if you looked at that list of the topics that we had, while we started off focusing on technologies, I think a critical point here is that we look at innovation as not just the shiny new object technology. That we believe innovation is cultural and so because of that we have looked at things that people might not associate with innovation. Our workplace of the future lab that we had a year, year and a half ago a lot of people were like, “Well how is that innovation?” Well it’s because we understood that there were a lot of changes happening in the workplace and what does that look like? Because of that lab it really helped spawn an initiative at EMC called digital workforce collaboration where over the next year we rolled out Microsoft Teams and Zoom and laptops to the remaining team members who were still using desktop computers. 

By some sheer luck most of that work was done by February of 2020. Just a mere two or three weeks before we sent everyone home because of COVID. If COVID had hit a year ago, EMC would not have been nearly as prepared as we were to work in a remote environment. So I’m not going to take all the credit, but it’s because we’re having some of those discussions in these labs to look at that transformation of what does the future look like? And that’s why this most recent one that’s just concluding on diversity, equity and inclusion, that’s a lab that we’ve actually been planning for and wanting to do for over a year. We originally had it teed up for Q4 of this year. But of course everyone has seen the news from the U.S. and just the wake of the George Floyd murder and the racial tensions that have been happening. We felt that it was absolutely the right thing to do to move that up and to have that discussion during the summer of 2020. It’s been probably my favorite lab yet and I say that to every lab. But just the discussion and trying to take an innovation approach to how does and organization like EMC look at diversity, equity and inclusion has been pretty cool. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thank you Jason. Just so interesting to hear, especially around like you said in terms of diversity, inclusion and then what you looked at last year. It certainly has helped you deal with the pandemic. A few more questions in. I think we’ve got time for a couple more. Next question, how have you managed to get your business teams to buy into the work being done by the innovation team? 

Angela Noble: 

So, we take the approach of going to the … Jason and I both mentioned that we need the business unit expertise and their experience. So we go to them first. So the slide where I talked about the four p’s with the Cross-Enterprise Innovation Team is really where we start. We talk to our business units to understand their innovation priorities, to really get to know them. What are the hurdles that you’re facing? What are the things that you’re really good at doing? How can we help strengthen those with innovation? Or how can we fill in some of the gaps with innovation? But what are your priorities and really go to them first. So I’m going to pause there and let Jason add his two cents as well. 

Jason Gross: 

Thanks Angela. I would say there was also some very intentional work on our part to do two things. First, to go for the low hanging fruit. We had some business leaders and some business units early on that were all in and really wanted to engage us. So we brought them out to Plug and Play. We worked with them on some early solutions. They wanted to work with us and we wanted to work with them and we made sure we got some early wins because we knew if we got some early wins that some of the others would then come along and say, “Hey I like what you did for this area. Can you do that for us too?” But we also very intentionally went after some of the business leaders and some of the business units that we thought might be our biggest, I don’t want to say critics or opponents. But just the ones that were like, “Yeah we’re good doing the things the way we’ve always done them. But thank you very much.” 

So for example the executive sponsor for our AR, VR lab augmented reality, virtual reality lab was at first our biggest critic for doing that technology. This was an executive who said, “Why are you bothering with that? There are so many other things that we can be doing right now to help our claims organization.” So before we even kicked off the lab I brought in one of the companies that we were looking at that does AR, VR education. We brought that executive in just for a small session and we let them experience, put on a virtual reality headset. An educational, I even forget what it was. But this company does like you can dissect frogs virtually and explore space virtually. I knew that executive had never put on a virtual reality headset before. As soon as she put it on, I could almost see the light bulbs going off. She was like, “Oh, we can use it for this. We could use it to train our claims. We could use it for that. Oh, we can use it for all these things.” And so that executive went from our biggest critic for that lab to wanting to be our sponsor for that lab and was even known to cancel meetings so she could go participate in the lab herself. 

So I mean it’s very tempting to just focus on the low hanging fruit and we certainly did that. But also look for innovative ways to engage some of those business leaders that maybe otherwise are dragging their feet a little bit too. 

Ben Telfer: 

Thanks very much Jason, Angela. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to have to end it there. There are a few more questions. Apologies for those who have submitted your questions and we didn’t get around to them. But please get in touch if there’s anything else I can pose to Jason or Angela after this webinar. A final thank you to Jason and Angela for joining us today. Thank you for everyone joining. Enjoy the rest of your day and hopefully see you on another ICMIF webinar soon. Thank you, goodbye. 

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