Driving innovation forward: 12 winning initiatives of Zurich Innovation Championship 2023 set for local roll-out
From submission to winner and now local execution – with the chance to be scaled globally. That’s the action-packed journey that this year’s Zurich Innovation Championship winners have undertaken over the past nine months.
Yesterday, Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) held its first Innovation Demo Day to celebrate the 12 winning initiatives that have successfully made it through a four-month long accelerator and will now be executed locally – and, in one case, even be launched as a global service.
True innovation requires relentless determination to turn challenges into growth opportunities. The Zurich Innovation Championship embodies this, and I'm thrilled to see the 12 winning initiatives. They're stepping stones towards the future of insurance.
Yesterday, Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) held its first Innovation Demo Day to celebrate the 12 winning initiatives that have successfully made it through a four-month long accelerator and will now be executed locally – and, in one case, even be launched as a global service.
During the event at Zurich’s headquarters, the 12 startups presented their initiatives, supported by executive judges for each of the five program categories: Sierra Signorelli (CEO Commercial Insurance) representing Commercial Insurance, Conny Kalcher (Group Chief Customer Officer) for Customer Experience, Jack Howell (CEO Zurich Global Ventures) for Digital Enablement and Distribution Partnerships, and Alison Martin (CEO EMEA and Bank Distribution) for Sustainability. Other guests that took the stage included Juan Beer (CEO, Zurich Switzerland), Sabine VanderLinden (Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Alchemy Crew), Omeed Mehrinfar (Managing Partner EMEA, Plug and Play), and Norbert Dohmen (Managing Director, Caruso, one of last year’s winners). Program co-sponsors Ericson Chan (Group Chief Information and Digital Officer) and Paolo Mantero (Group Chief Strategy Officer) closed the event and, by that, also brought the Zurich Innovation Championship 2023 to an end.
Zurich kicked off the fourth edition of its global startup program, the Zurich Innovation Championship, in January 2023. In May 2023, it announced this year’s winners from more than 3,500 submissions. The winners then entered a four-month accelerator during which they worked on testing the practical viability of their initiatives and preparing a business plan together with the Zurich business units that selected them. All the initiatives are now preparing for local roll-out, with the potential to be scaled globally. In the case of Paris-based startup Citalid, it is already ramping up to integrate its cyber risk quantification platform as part of a new global service of Zurich Resilience Solutions.
The Zurich Innovation Championship is a transformative learning experience for both the startups and Zurich alike. By combining the expertise of our business unit teams with innovative, tech-savvy startups, I believe we have built 12 initiatives that really have the potential to shake things up in the industry.
Altogether, more than 45 collaborations are ongoing globally with previous winners and participants from the four editions of the Zurich Innovation Championship, including some that have started to be rolled out globally.
The next edition of the Zurich Innovation Championship is due to launch in late January 2024. Startups can sign up on the website to be notified about any updates.
