Tech giants, paddling pools and 3D printed space rockets

Signing up to a multi-year transformation programme won’t build your future business. It will certainly update your current business and might, if you’re lucky, build the foundation for your future. But, if you’re not running a disruptive innovation strategy in parallel, it won’t be long before those foundations are all you’re left with.

I appreciate it’s not easy. Insurance experts have been carefully and beautifully crafted to be risk adverse. All I ask is you open your eyes to what’s going on outside of your business, then do something about it.

A Dog’s Life
I’m just back from speaking at the iFHP (International Federation of Health Plans) conference in Lisbon – a CEO level event for members only held every two years.

Key highlights from my co-speakers:
Google – I’m loving seeing the big tech players make a move into insurance. Hopefully you’ll have been tracking Amazon’s various moves. This time, though, it was Google’s turn to share, although very little after Dr Henry Wei’s presentation had been through the corporate filters!

Henry touched on today being an inflection point in human history (not just insurance), how they’re exploring on-device, distributed machine learning (which sounds pretty incredible/terrifying from a big data perspective) and how you ‘don’t get a second chance to build trust’. Quite right, Big Brother Google.

What blew my mind was Henry’s last slide: Google are close to predicting when you’re going to die – and they can do this with a pretty decent level of accuracy (gulp). That doesn’t just disrupt life insurance. That pretty much destroys the entire life insurance vertical.

Alan – loved listening to Jean-Charles, who isn’t looking to build ‘just’ a health insurer; he’s got his eyes set on dominating the French market, rolling out globally and scaling to become a tech giant alongside the Googles of the world. And that was his answer to his 5-year plan. I’d like to see what his 10-year plan looks like.

A seriously smart man, a successful entrepreneur with one exit under his belt already and ambitions as big as they come – love it.

Oscar Health – a rubbing update on these guys as, sadly, I couldn’t stay around to hear what Mario Schlosser had to say, as I had to get a flight back to pick up my dog from his boutique hotel. When I die (which reminds me I need to ask Google when this will be), I’m coming back as a dog.

In many ways, it’s the answer to being continuously asked who is the next Uber or Airbnb.

The list features the world’s most disruptive businesses and is drawn from Tällt’s data-intelligence on millions of startups around the world and curated by leading entrepreneurs, investors and business folk.

It was great to see a shift in this year’s 100 towards a new generation of companies driving social change whilst concurrently building financially profitable businesses. About time.

No matter what industry you work in, go have a read. It’s got solar panels that can turn air into water, a device that can read your thoughts and what list would be complete without 3D printed space rockets?!

This week, we caught up with Lior Shacham, the founder of PicUP, which is rolling out some seriously interesting call centre tech. With 75% of all calls going unanswered, their platform provides a call interface which is contextual, branded and personalised.