On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Sebastian Pitzler – managing director of InsurLab Germany, a leading tech accelerator for startups wanting to enter the German market via Cologne.

Before moving to the other side of the coin, Sebastian worked for a very well-known Insurance company, Ergo, a subsidiary company of MunichRe. He also has a background in IT strategy, board management and digital lab development.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Within our industry there has been a great mind shift within the last 5-6 years. When I was responsible for the lab in Berlin, in the beginning it was hard to talk with the procurement department to create a contract between a startup and an incumbent. The insurance industry was coming from an IT background which was focused on programming languages and self-developed software solutions. Then they began using standard software like Microsoft, SAP and others and finally then they were open to work and collaborate with startups.
• It’s great to have seen the number of startups doubling over the last few years, and that’s because there are a couple of trends coming together: The willingness and acceptance to support startups and the management attention that investments are necessary to build and grow these startup ecosystems. Secondly, to see that startups are able to help and find solutions to a problem in the short term, which is something we realised in Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have been able to create a lot of win-win situations and success stories where we could demonstrate that a startup solution could help to overcome, for example, the bottleneck of internal IT capacity.
• Networking the Insurance Industry is what our InsurLab Germany is about: To build a strong and reliable network for the parties and enthusiasts who want to work on innovation and digitalisation. From the beginning the design of the initiative was that we needed insurance companies on board as well as startups, IT providers, consultancy companies, and universities to bring together different competencies to work on issues and topics like innovation and digitalisation. It’s also worth mentioning
• By setting up InsurNext, our goal was clear; that it’s not only about insurances, startups and tech companies, we also wanted to include the cross-industry and science dimensions because it’s logical if you want to develop innovation and digitalisation for insurances in an ecosystem economy, you need to involve different parties. It’s great to see how cross-industry partners are joining InsurNext like Garmin, Volvo and Lufthansa Systems all collaborating with our startups.

BEST MOMENTS

‘I’m not the classical insurance guy, I’m more of a tech enthusiast.’

‘Within the last six months we have supported 15 startups to develop and grow, we’ve supported them with over 60 mentors from our network on the insurance side and the InsurTech side. This has developed 40 projects, some that are up and running as products on the market.’

‘The corporates want to innovate, but avoid risks, and the startups want to grow quickly, but sometimes they speak different languages and we need to be a translator or build bridges between both those worlds to understand the different needs and perspectives.’

‘Digitalisation is about more than technology, it’s about mind shift, agility, customer centricity on a new level. That’s why it was so important, from scratch, to build InsurLab Germany as a network of different parties and drivers beside the member network that we have created and our partner network.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sebastian Pitzler is Managing Director of InsurLab Germany since March 2018. Previously, he was head of the ERGO Digital Lab in Berlin and was responsible for setting up and expanding this innovation laboratory in the Berlin start-up scene.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pitzler/

Website: https://insurlab-germany.com/en/insurlab/

ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, and commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers and accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner.

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