Joining Nationwide Ventures

Over the last few months consulting with an open innovation group, I was motivated to put together a reflection for someone considering joining a corporate innovation team. There is a ton of energy and resource pouring into corporate innovation, so I’m excited to see how teams continue to evolve as more empirical returns on their success and struggles gets published.

I’m also excited to be returning to corporate innovation full time, but in this case on the other side of the table with Nationwide Ventures, the venture arm of Nationwide. *queue the Leslie Odom Jr. theme music*

I will be focusing on strategic partnerships, which I think about in two directions — external and internal. Externally, the focus is to bring in better deal flow and identify startups that should be plugging into Nationwide as partners. Internally, I ensure the right business leaders are at the table when a startup is investing time in a pilot opportunity with Nationwide and to bring employees along on our innovation journey (this makes partnering with startups way easier in the long run!).

Several innovation teams structure themselves like Nationwide, with the corporate venture arm under a centralized Chief Innovation Officer. In many cases, the CIO is further nested under a larger marketing division (I believe GE just restructured into a similar flow).

Nationwide Ventures is a strategic investor, meaning that we look for investments to not only produce a venture appropriate outcome, but ones that could also connect into existing or emerging business lines at Nationwide within the subsequent 6–18 months. Most often, this happens through a pilot or joint development opportunity.

Something super interesting to me about Nationwide, known prominently for their auto and home policies, is that some of their most important offerings are their financial services products. In this context, Nationwide Ventures focuses on four main investment domains:

• Mobility — Provide services for consumers or businesses with new types of mobility, requiring new protection.
• Cybersecurity — Protect businesses and consumers from cyber attacks through breadth of service offerings.
• Living comfortably in retirement — Meet income and non-income consumer needs in retirement.
• Digital — Somewhat of a catch-all, but really focused on companies that are developing novel solutions such digitization of business models, engagement, markets, solutions, interactions and connectivity that could support insurtech and financial services.

Reading through these investment themes, I’m impassioned by the work we have ahead with our capable team. With roughly 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day, there is a critical need to ensure the right guidance and products are there for them to live comfortably. As we begin to look further down the pipeline, I see my own generation running into hurdles that we must start anticipating now, likely around student loan debt, longevity or long term care.

I’m excited to tackle these topics with our current portfolio, and I’m looking forward to continuing to find ways to collaborate with the innovation ecosystem broadly! Get in touch if you see partnership/collaboration opportunities, or if you are a startup that fits our investment thesis.