In the Actuarial Review, September/October 2014 issue, we shared with you why there’s an urgency to innovate in today’s competitive environment, and the steps the CAS is taking to instill an innovative culture, starting with the formation of the Innovation Council. Since then, the Council has set in motion a number of initiatives that will help foster innovation within the CAS and the actuarial profession.
Innovator Profile Webinar Series
CAS members who have embraced the principles of innovation to accelerate the growth of their actuarial practices are the focus of the Innovator Profile Webinar Series. The series’s first webinar, “Innovation in Predictive Modeling,” features Serhat Guven, FCAS, who expands on “Eight Pillars of Innovation,” an article by Susan Wojcicki, then Google’s senior vice president of advertising and now CEO of YouTube. Guven describes how applying the principles of innovation has contributed to the rapid development of predictive analytics in insurance pricing.
Next in the series is Melissa Salton, FCAS, CERA, who will discuss how innovation principles are applied in ERM framework development for U.S. property-casualty insurers. Future webinars for 2015 will focus on catastrophe management and other topics.
Challenging Orthodoxies
“Accelerating Our Envisioned Future through Innovation” was the theme of the 2014 CAS Leadership Summit, held last October in Philadelphia. During the Summit, Erik Kaier, a member of the leadership team of Deloitte’s innovation practice, helped attendees understand the importance of challenging an organization’s orthodoxies—pervasive beliefs that often go unstated and unchallenged, and that ultimately shape strategy and create blind spots over time. Orthodoxies are ingrained ways of thinking and acting, from habit or from previous successes, and they can make it impossible to see innovation possibilities that are hiding in plain sight.
Summit attendees identified several current CAS orthodoxies, including:
- “The current ‘fee for service’ principle (dues, meetings, exams, etc.) is the best way to fund the CAS.”
- “Actuaries are the best qualified for data science in the property-casualty arena.”
- “High barriers to entry (membership) assure success of the CAS and its members.”
The CAS needs to examine the actions that first made its gains possible and then determine if these actions are still useful or must change. In that spirit, intensive efforts are underway to challenge CAS orthodoxies and review how the CAS might operate if an orthodoxy would no longer be adhered to.
Innovation Master Class at the 2015 Spring Meeting
The Innovation Council is planning to offer an Innovation Master Class at the CAS Spring Meeting in Colorado Springs in May. Led by Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovations LLC, the class will teach attendees how to construct an innovation framework and use it to develop and deliver innovative ideas and solutions in their actuarial careers. More details will be provided when the Spring Meeting program is announced.
The CAS Innovation Process
The CAS has engaged an outside consultant to help develop a customized innovation process for the CAS. This journey will provide an understanding of how the CAS innovation process can create new and meaningful value for the organization’s stakeholders and unleash the potential to transform the actuarial profession as a whole. We began with an Innovation Workshop in February 2015, and we are now designing an innovation process prototype, with a target completion date of early 2015 and implementation following soon thereafter. Our goal is to design a simple, robust and functional CAS innovation process that is responsive to the marketplace, is accessible to member contributions and maximizes the impact of the organization’s investment in innovation. Look for more information on this effort in our next update and on the CAS website.
Join Us!
To get involved, contact Bingham at kbingham@deloitte.com and Halpert at ahalpert@amhadvisory.com.
Kevin Michael Bingham, ACAS, is a principal for Deloitte Consulting, LLP in Hartford, Connecticut. Aaron M. Halpert, ACAS, is a principal with AMH Advisory LLC in New York.
