Maarten Ectors is the Chief Innovation Office at Legal and General. He has helped companies like Amazon launch new services and disrupt markets. At the time of the interview, he was focused on disrupting insurance from the inside. In this conversation, we explore some very interesting ideas
There are few ideas that stood out for me in this conversation:
- If people are sleeping in the streets for the competitor’s product, you might need to rethink your offering. Maarten made this point in an almost a dismissive fashion. He was describing when he worked at Nokia and people could not understand why people were willing to sleep in the street for an inferior product. People sleeping in the road for the competitors offering should have been a warning sign that iPhone and Android were onto something that Nokia had missed.
- Build a future that looks enticing for your children. Maarten made the point that we should always strive to balance our professional and personal life. He then raised the bar by asking a compelling question: Does the future you are building look enticing for your children? When working on innovation, our moral compass must always point towards making a better future for your kids. Building a better future for your kids can be unpacked in many ways, but it is an excellent compass for us to have in mind. It is a subtle point, but it is something that I think both Maarten and I agree should be essential components of innovation.
- In a digital age, the rules are entirely different. I loved this observation. I see it very often with incumbents. In my experience, incumbents are usually playing by the rules of an old game. If the rules of the game have changed and you are playing by the old rules you are going to be left behind.
- Additionally, if your competitors have a better or cheaper product, you are in trouble. If they have both, you need to think about disrupting yourself. Otherwise, you are likely watching the other companies iPhone moment.
- Do digital experiments to find Aha moments. Maarten made the point that the problem with digital disruption is that you need to need to find solutions to the issues that customers do not know they have or have not yet expressed. The challenge is being able to do this in a way that the cost of failure is low. It is easy for us to say this, but changing the engine while your and flying and still having to keep an eye on what your customers don’t yet know they want is no easy task.
- Find a way to address the emotion of experiencing failure. It is one thing to say we need to put an incomplete idea in front of the customer. It is another thing to feel comfortable doing it. One way to address the comfort level of company leaders, Maarten suggests, is to do a quick video of the prototype. Do not do a spreadsheet or PowerPoint. Show them the idea in action in as minimal a form as possible. Do not build the complete model. Build the minimum working model you can. Keep in mind the value of doing a demo is etting feedback.
I really enjoyed my conversation with Maarten. There is a lot to learn from this episode. One of the questions Maarten asks, is how would I disrupt your business? It is an interesting question to hold in mind while listening to this episode. For a moment, think about how you would disrupt your own sector? It is what I call a holding question. A holding question is a question you hold in your mind while you do your own work. As you continue to disrupt sectors and systems ask yourself, how you would disrupt my own sector or business? Hope you enjoy this episode.