What T. rex can teach us about innovation

Tyrannosaurus rex (‘tyrant lizard king’) was a fearsome predator, weighing up to nine tons. Probably if you had asked a T. rex about evolution, it would have spoken in glowing terms about the future. When you’re T. rex and on top of the food chain, who thinks about asteroids?

After taking stock of three successful iterations of its global tournament for startups, Zurich Insurance Group (‘Zurich’) is now preparing to launch the fourth edition of the Zurich Innovation Championship. The Championship is proof that even big corporations can be nimble and able to evolve to meet challenges in a changing world. Evolution can be a friend of large companies as well as small startups, offering chances for both to learn from each other.

Through the Zurich Innovation Championship, Zurich, as a global insurer, can draw on its own expertise dating all the way back to when it was founded in 1872. Its experience can also benefit smaller companies, including those over 4,500 that submitted entries for the previous three Championships. These have given rise over the past five years to more than 40 global pilot projects and 29 active initiatives currently underway. The Zurich Innovation Championship has thus shown it can bring together the best of both worlds: Zurich’s strengths gained from 150 years in business, and the bold thinking and ideas that startups bring, some with the explosive potential to transform both our industry and our lives.

Collaboration is key

Both insurers and insurtechs have a viable future, and lots to learn from each other. Perhaps the challenges insurers face are not on par with an asteroid striking the planet. But the forces affecting businesses and individuals today (climate change, pervasive digital technology, changes to how we get around, e.g., mobility, etc.) will profoundly affect everything around us, including the types of risks insurers cover, to how they connect and interact with customers. Companies, even well-established ones like Zurich, can learn much from young, quick and focused new ones. Startup ventures are not challengers. They are valuable friends.

“We love working with insurtechs. It’s a great way to help us to find new solutions for our customers,” says Ericson Chan, Zurich’s Group Chief Information & Digital Officer. “That’s true especially in uncertain times. We must step up as an industry and as individuals. Technology is part of our lives. It is an enabler, and vital in transformation. Insurtech plays a critical role in our industry, especially in working with, and engaging customers.”

True innovation thus goes well beyond inventing clever technology. T.rex, after all, had some pretty smart features, too, including, according to some paleontologists – feathers. But surviving evolutionary change demands a whole range of adaptations. And the right mindset – being open to new ideas and ways of working.

Ongoing relationships

The success of previous Zurich Innovation Championships can be measured in many ways. One is the fact that several startups that took part in the first two Championships (2018-2019, and 2020-2021) are still in active collaborations with Zurich.

The third, and most recent Championship in 2021-2022 produced 12 winners, including Salient, whose co-founder, Raymond Schmitt is a physical oceanographer. He became fascinated by ocean salinity as a predictor of rainfall. Zurich’s Santander Brazil and Zurich Brazil saw Salient’s approach as an ideal way to spot climate risks. They believe it even allowed them to foresee freezing weather in Texas and devastating flooding in Germany long before others forecast these events.

Besides getting to work with the best and brightest new companies, startups also give Zurich’s own businesses a way to embrace the startup mindset. In the case of Brazil and Salient, Zurich’s teams were forced to “work in a very short timeframe” while applying new methodologies and skills, according to Mariane Bottaro at Zurich Santander Brazil.

Accelerating opportunities

“The Zurich Innovation Championship is much more than just another startup competition,” says Paolo Mantero, Zurich’s Group Chief Strategy Officer. Besides the potential it brings to transform just about any part of Zurich’s business, it can offer startups “an interesting environment in which they can optimize and scale their ideas together with our local businesses.”

The first Zurich Innovation Championship, which concluded in 2019, attracted 458 entries, a number that roughly trebled to 1,358 by the next Championship, and more than doubled again to 2,762 for the most recent Championship that concluded in 2022.

Startups enter and compete first in local rounds of the Zurich Innovation Championship. If they succeed in their local rounds, they join other finalists from all over the world in a final round judged by Zurich’s most senior leaders. One of the key lessons from previous editions was to add an accelerator phase, bringing to life an intense collaboration between Zurich and the startup,” according to a study Zurich published in December 2022.

Sabine VanderLinden, co-founder and managing partner at Alchemy Crew, a venture commercialization lab for insurance and financial services, particularly praises the accelerator model that Zurich introduced. Not only does it allow Zurich to grow and scale its relationships with startups. The intense process can also help to prove and grow solutions that startups bring to the table.

Zurich has introduced several stages of development within the accelerator, helping to standardize the process and speed up validation. It also has added global and regional experts from within and outside Zurich to support local businesses during the accelerator phase, making it more likely that solutions will be adopted internally.

Change can be good

Change doesn’t have to be scary. What stands out in a final, detailed analysis of the Zurich Innovation Championship is not only the model. It’s also the dedication that successful contestants bring to the table, and Zurich’s own seriousness of purpose that sets it apart.

And don’t forget the value of evolution. Creatures that survived in the wake of the asteroid that struck Earth 65 million years ago, hurtling the world into cold and darkness, were those that could meet the challenges of a radical new environment. T. rex didn’t survive. But some of its ancestors did. Small, nimble ones. According to The Harvard Gazette, citing an analysis of T. rex protein, the fearsome predators shared a common ancestry with birds. Obviously, the future belongs to those willing and able to adapt.

*The picture used is AI generated.