Innovation and Dig Deeper Newsletter January 2024

New Ideas.

New Opportunity.

Dig Deeper

What's new in the world of innovation and curiosity?

Here's your January update of the Acadia Innovation newsletter, your consolidated source for new innovation happenings at Acadia Insurance.

Browse below to learn more!

January 2024

Acadia Innovation Update What's new in the world of innovation for 2024? Check out page one for more information.

Customer Focused Innovation Idea in Action Check out how the Quick Quote innovation experiment went and if it was successful on page one of this newsletter.

Click Here to Submit Ideas to Customer Impact

New Episode of The Edge Featuring Rob Berkley Episode one of The Edge podcast for season three is now available.

This podcast is an interview with Rob Berkley talking about his career and the importance of being connected to everyday realities of the business.

Meet an Active SPARK! User Find out why it is important to Jim Kane to be actively engaged in Acadia's innovation efforts.

Knowledge Check Answer an innovation question for the chance to win a prize!

Click Here to Submit Ideas to Operational Efficiency

Dig Deeper Campaign Dig Deeper and Stay Curious Every Client Has A Problem. Do You Know What It Is? An Update from Acadia's Innovation Leader- Matt McManus Early in 2023 we evolved our approach to Innovation. We have realized the benefits available to us through the SPARK! platform, however, we did not have it structured in a way to foster the type of innovation focus we strive for. To that end, we revised our Challenge set-up to offer two distinct avenues, one solely focusing on Customers and one focused on Operational Efficiency. This allowed us to engage our scoring and experimentation team members on the customer-minded ideas, while still accepting new ways to operate internally and handling them in a more concise manner.

At the same time, we launched the ‘Dig-Deeper’ campaign throughout the organization. This effort is all about building and flexing our curiosity muscles. We recognize that to evolve and stay relevant in the market to both agents and insureds, we must continue to be curious about their business, how they are evolving, and better understand their problems. We offered a variety of ways to display curiosity, and locally engaged employees to participate. I am thrilled with the various ways each profit center has engaged with this concept in their own way.

As a result, by the end of 2023, we: 1. Have a greater understanding of customers’ needs/challenges that could ultimately lead to ideas that drive greater opportunity to test solutions 2. Are sitting on a number of topics, discovered through curiosity, to explore through ideation 3. Have a revised experimentation approach, focusing efforts to achieve results in a rapid fashion 4. Have begun to see measurable outcomes, evidenced by the Quick Quote Expansion experiment that is estimated to produce close to $200,000 in additional New Business for the Marine profit center in 2024.

We currently have four additional experiments in flight aimed at growing Acadia and providing a greater customer experience. We are hopeful that the results of those experiments will provide us with ample learning opportunities on how to drive greater value to our customers. In fact, our Strategic Measure/Goal for Innovation in 2024 will be realizing $1,000,000 in growth opportunities directly resulting from closed experiments.

There is one additional change we will be implementing in SPARK! this year. Effective January 31st, the Workplace and Culture Challenge will be turned off. Workplace and Culture ideas relate to how we do what we do, how our leaders lead, what we value and how we interact with each other. Since established 3 years ago, the Challenge has generated roughly 70 ideas. We appreciate your commitment to enhancing Acadia’s culture, and going forward we ask that you share any ideas or suggestions related to workplace and culture with your leadership team or Human Resources directly.

Leadership and our HR team will continue to commit to offer opportunities to collect your feedback, including Employee Engagement Surveys.

Lastly, I will leave you with a quote from Rob Berkley, from the recently released Edge Podcast (Season 3, Episode 1), that describes how he views Innovation: “…As an invitation to every colleague throughout the organization, who cares about the organization that they are a part of, and takes pride in what they do, this is an invitation for us to continue to experiment, to continue to improve, to continue to, as suggested earlier, set the table for tomorrow. This is an opportunity to not just to be a job that you come to every day and you complete a task...This is an opportunity for every colleague throughout the organization to participate in setting the course for this business going forward and to put their mark on it, and to make a difference.”

Customer Focused Innovation Idea in Action 3 years ago the Inland Marine profit center launched a new program, labeled 'Quick Quote'. The program was an innovative way to provide a fast solution to agents, specifically when needed to place miscellaneous property items on an inland marine coverage form. A quick quote application and quote document provided up to $100,000 in binding authority to the agent, on the spot. The Quick Quote Program finished 2022 with $499,000 in written premium and a 25% Ultimate L/R. The idea submitted by Mari Sepulveda is to iterate on the early success of the Quick Quote Program, by expanding the eligibility to $250,000 in total TIV. Experiment Design First, Inland Marine worked hand in hand with Home Office for approval to increase the eligibility thresholds and allow for increased binding authority. After positive discussion, and a close review of pricing and deductible options, they were able to progress forward.

Secondly, they identified an effective marketing strategy of sending an email blast to all agents and engaging all underwriters in discussing this change with key personnel at their assigned agencies.

Results The experiment period was 9/1/23-11/30/23. During this period, Inland Marine experienced a year over year increase in new business policies in force of 34% and a year over year increase in average premium size of 16.5% - both exceeding anticipated results. They plan to expand this over a 12 month period where they anticipate this to contribute a minimum of $182,000 in New Business premium for the Inland Marine profit center.

New Ideas.

New Opportunity.

Dig Deeper The Edge Podcast New Ideas. New Opportunity. Dig Deeper

Season three of Berkley's "The Edge" Podcast is back up and running. Click on the episode description below to take a listen:

The Edge Podcast Series - Season 3 | Rob Berkley, President and CEO This episode features W. R. Berkley Corporation's own, Rob Berkley, President and CEO. Host, Bill Rodhe, and Rob talk about Rob's career at Berkley and the importance of being connected to the everyday realities of the business. They reflect on the exciting successes of innovation in 2023 and how innovation allows us to remain nimble in the face of an ever-increasing pace of change in today's world. Rob calls the team to action, to embed innovation practices into everything they do and to do it together. They also address the rumors around the innovation initiatives beginnings and look ahead at the impact of AI on the business.

Meet an Active SPARK! User

We are continuing to highlight Acadia team members that are (the most) actively engaged in SPARK! The next active SPARK! user is Jim Kane, Inland Marine Underwriter. We asked Jim: Why is it important to you to be actively engaged in Acadia’s Innovation efforts?

"It's important to me because Innovation is our greatest tool against disruption. The past 4 years have been endless change and disruption for Americans; how we live and work. Since Acadia insures how people live and work, if that's changing it's imperative we respond.

I like that innovation is an open conversation here at Acadia, and they've created the SPARK! platform for anyone with the company to throw out and discuss ideas. I think that helps foster diversity of thought and leads to new ideas. We also have the Curiosity Cards, I like that we can pose questions without necessarily needing an idea on how to "fix" the issue. Sometimes it's enough to be Socratic and simply question.

In a paranoid underwriter kind of way, I worry about the future coming for all of us. We can try to forecast and anticipate, but there's really no telling how disruption will appear. I don't want to be the blacksmith making horse shoes when the Model T rolls into town. Being open to innovation might help prevent obsolescence."

Knowledge Check We had 12 employees correctly answer our last Knowledge Check questions, but Karoline Sands was our lucky winner! Karoline, please be on the lookout for your prize shortly.

Answer our next Knowledge Check question to win a special prize! Click on the green button to the left to submit your answer.

Click Here to Answer the Next Knowledge Check!

Next Knowledge Check: What is the name of the former Acadia employee that Rob Berkley mentions as his first manager at Acadia?