Collaboration in the world of innovation is essential. Innovation requires openness and connectedness across internal and external innovators. Two qualities that corporates, based on their institutional culture, struggle with.

In this part, we look at how insurers embrace open innovation – the processes they implement; the talent they hire or empower; the programs they design and test; and of course the types of partnerships they look for.

Authors Tshidi Hagan, Roberta Rizzo, and Bjorn Cumps all explore formalized models that support the collaboration needs of enterprises with the value gained from new market entrants and FinTech startups.

Much is said about the rise of innovation centres to service financial institutions. Dorota Zimnoch pays specific attention to how some of these capital intensive and highly diverse environments operate and thrive.

Partnerships are a key theme. The types of partnerships span innovation sources such as accelerators and incubators as well as co-investors and even other insurers. Partnering is commonplace in the technology industry but in insurance it is far less prevalent. However, there are some excellent examples of working partnerships described here, which pay specific attention to commercial, operational, and legal considerations.

Intra-organizational collaboration is a big theme too and includes how leadership can work to incentivize staff but also what cultural triggers are key to help make corporate innovation sustainable and embedded in how people view intrapreneurship. Particularly interesting are Willie Pienaar’s insights into how classic change management models are being stretched to mould open innovation best practice.

Finally, Denis Thomas does make some sound recommendations on how competition and collaboration can often exist as a continuum to gain from combined strengths. This part is packed full of fascinating and evolving case studies – a chapter that everyone can relate to and gain value from.