Round up of Making Innovation Happen - London

[avatar user="cbeattie@celent.com" size="thumbnail" align="right" /] On Wednesday the 24th Celent hosted our event Making Innovation Happen in Insurance : Hedging Against the Future. The aim of the event was to move beyond the call to action, beyond the cries that innovation is necessary to discuss some practical ways insurers could innovate or have innovated. The feedback suggests we were able to do just that. Jamie Macgregor welcomed our guests and introduced the day, swiftly followed by Mike Fitzgerald setting out Celent's view on how innovation is not a dark art, but something that insurers can cultivate. We moved on to hear from folks outside of the industry with Komal Joshi of Planned Departures talking about how they had used different types of partnerships to in their organisation. Paul Batterham and Rupert Tebb were then kind (brave?) enough to take the audience from the insurance industry through an exercise thinking differently about how to deliver a product for a specific group. I'm an optimist but I'll have to admit some skepticism about how engaged our audience would be but the discussion kicked off so quickly they didn't wait for the end of the instructions! After a break Catherine Stagg-Macey and Lori Shook took the audience through how neuro-science and the limbic system drives responses even in corporate, unemotional environments. The audience interaction continued with an exercise that demonstrated our sense of fair play and revenge. I pitched in with a view of prioritisation and metrics that hopefully gave some tools for thinking differently about the tasks at hand and which ideas should be really getting your attention (I'd love to hear if anyone managed to apply them when they got back to work yesterday). Finally, Oliver Werneyer kept the audience captivated with his story of preparing a 150 year old organisation for innovation and the importance of having a beard when engaging with startups and in hackathons (at least I think that was the key message). Perhaps our illustrator caught the message better: [caption id="attachment_3811" align="alignnone" width="300"] Our illustrators view of the discussion in London regarding Innovation and making it happen. (Get in touch for the full resolution version)[/caption] All in all it was perhaps an odd mix of ingredients for a Wednesday morning but the result was well received with different participants, as the audience became, getting different things from each of the sessions. This was something of a shake up of style from our usual events, a little test and learn from us and one that needed a lot of interaction. I'm glad to say our experiment worked. For the live twitter discussion feel free to review the #celentinnovate Tweets. If you missed it and want more details do get in touch!