Hood Group launches lab to drive innovation

Hood Group launches lab to drive innovation

Data and technology driven insurance specialist, Hood Group has set up its own Innovation Lab to drive the development of insurance products, services and solutions to help transform the customer experience.

Gavin Dobson, Head of Marketing at Hood Group, comments: “Insurance in its current state isn’t truly serving today’s customers and certainly won’t work for the next generation. Right now it’s simply a necessity people feel they have to have rather than want. We don’t see why insurance can’t become something that people willingly buy into as a service that helps them live their lives, helps stop things from going wrong or makes the annoying things in life go away.

“But if we are going to bring about the changes needed to transform the customer’s view of insurance then we need to think freely, away from the constraints of the day-to-day business. That’s why we’ve decided to invest in setting up our own Innovation Lab away from our Southend based offices to foster creativity and a disruptive approach.”

Located in the WeWork community in Spitalfields, the Innovation Lab will identify, evaluate, design, prototype and launch new personal lines products and services. Hood Group has created a number of new roles to act as the core of the lab but the make-up of the Lab’s team going forward will flex to reflect the expertise needed to bring individual projects to fruition.

Simon Hood, CEO at Hood Group adds: “Innovation underpins our growth plans as part of our 5 year strategy. We offer a unique route into our insurance partners and brand partners that will be hugely attractive and beneficial to start-ups and InsurTech businesses.“

Hood continues: “In addition, this helps deliver our performance culture; from bringing on board new talent from outside the insurance industry, through to encouraging our existing staff to get involved. We want a pipeline of ideas to evaluate and prioritise. Not all are going to work – in fact if some don’t fail then I’ll question whether we’re pushing the boundaries hard enough! However, with rigorous evaluation and analysis and testing to ensure the idea is both a game changer as well as commercially viable, I’m confident that we’ll be able to bring a range of totally fresh ideas to market that will deliver real value to our partners and more importantly, their customers.”