A couple of weeks back, I attended a conference by the ESMT Business School in Berlin. I listened to several panel discussions that day. And while we forget most of the stuff again we hear on days like these, on thing stuck in my head for a while. Dr. Christof Mascher, Chief Operating Officer at Allianz, said that they are not paying attention to startups and that they are also not worried about Big Data because their business model was always data-driven. They would breath data from the beginning.

Innovation in the 20th century

Back than, and especially now, where I think about it, this is a dangerous way of seeing the world. In fact, I believe it is a very old-fashioned way to think about uprising competition. Let me explain.

Until 20 years back, companies where able to track their competition. New technology was introduced by their biggest competitors and somehow companies were able to anticipate the uprising competition. Competitive threats from the outside world didn’t raise over night.
I am not very old yet and hence I cannot talk from experience when it comes to this point. I need to refer to experts that have more experiences like Steve Blank who talks about this in his latest podcast at the Standford University.

The new way

He also mentions in there that something very fundamental has changed when it comes to company-driven innovation that should also make someone like Mr. Maschner more sensitive for this issue. The new entrants nowadays are extremely wealth because many are able to raise insane amounts of money. He gives an example, saying that Tesla Motors had more money available to invest in R&D in the first 5 years then any other Automotive giant. In the same years.

This combined with the agile, speedy, risk-taking character a start-up has can have very powerful synergies effects.

While the insurance business is a rather locally oriented one, I believe that Allianz will be safer than other companies like Mercedes and BMW which can also be threatened by other global companies.

In addition to that, start-ups are not only able to raise money quickly. They also are able to use their data better. They are growing up with it and they can optimize all their processes accordingly. Big companies do not have the ability to quickly change processes based on. Data insights. They have to reinvent themselves. Moreover, they are more desirable by millennials. They are growing up in this new world and are more in line with the speed of development.

I believe that we will see way more changes in our business landscape in the next few years and that we need to figure out how we derive meaningful services and products that are integratabtle in the companies business model. If you think similar, I would love if you would say hi and we can get an interesting exchange going.
Otherwise, if you have any questions regarding this topic and want to know how you could get your company to get started in this field, please don’t hesitate to contact me.