Anthemis Industry Insights: The Role of Venture Capital in Corporate Innovation Strategies

As investors, one of the more frequent questions we have been asked over the past few weeks is around the pace of innovation and the general health of the venture capital industry. We have embraced the new working environment by hosting regular webinars, which gather insights from our industry on a range of topics. This week, Ruth Foxe Blader and I focused the conversation on “The Role of Venture Capital in Corporate Innovation Strategies”.

Joined by Sibylle Fischer from Baloise, Ben Luckett from Aviva, Nadeem Khan from Aflac Corporate Ventures and Ali Geramian from KPMG, we discussed:

• How macroeconomic trends are influencing existing innovation strategies
• How companies can enhance corporate strategies with venture capital/investment partnerships
• The key components needed to build a successful investment partnership platform.

Our panel this week was stacked with three innovative insurers who have been successful, in different ways, in incorporating venture capital into their innovation strategies. Sibylle was able to share her journey over the past five years, from starting with a scouting program — maturing to an investment partnership that has yielded learning from investments all over the world and brought Baloise to thinking about areas outside of traditional insurance.

While Nadeem didn’t bring the Aflac Duck with him, he did bring fantastic insights into how Aflac has been able to build a $400M corporate venture capital fund with teams in Japan and the US. Aflac has found that deep integration with the business units, and a team with both investing and insurance expertise, enables him to move quickly in engaging with startups and executing investment opportunities.

Ben discussed how his VC strategy complements Aviva’s overall strategy of “Build, Partner and Invest”. One of the keys to success echoed across all the panelists is the importance of innovation strategies having broad corporate support and alignment with the top priorities of a company.

Ali spends most of his days engaging with insurers and financial institutions, helping them set up their innovation strategies. If there is any doubt that the pace of innovation is accelerating — talk to Ali! Similar to what we are seeing at Anthemis, companies appear to be doubling down on transformation efforts and devoting additional resources towards areas of the business most affected by COVID-19.

Over the last couple of weeks, we have found ourselves engaged in conversation with numerous financial institutions on how innovation may evolve through this period of uncertainty. We believe that authentic collaboration will be the differentiator that will provide leaders with the edge to harness the best opportunities.

As we continue the conversation around the changing insurance industry, join us next week for “Insurance Applications of the Computer Vision and AI of Today”, where we will focus on the exciting world of computer vision and how it is helping to solve problems in insurance previously considered…impossible to solve.