‍How BTV leaders collaborate with competitors to benefit consumers

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The concept of "coopetition"—a blend of competition and cooperation—has gained traction in various industries, from tech giants like Google and Microsoft to large retailers like Amazon and Walmart. With coopetition, competitors may share supply chains, logistics, technology, or infrastructure to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

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The insurance industry is also gaining traction from coopetition. Several partners at BrokerTech Ventures (BTV), who are regional competitors, consistently work together to share best practices, experiences and other insights to help drive innovation. In the pre-competitive space, brokers, carriers, and wholesalers work collaboratively to leverage strengths and resources to create and improve industry standards. The end goal, ultimately, is to benefit consumers.

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Here, four insurance industry leaders discuss the concept of coopetition and its influence on innovation at BTV:

• Dan Keough, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Holmes Murphy and Co-CEO/Co-Founder at BrokerTech Ventures
• Mike Victorson, Chief Executive Officer at M3 Insurance and Co-CEO/Co-Founder at BrokerTech Ventures
• Wendi Bukowitz, VP, Director of Strategic Innovation at The Cincinnati Insurance Companies‍
• Tom Parsons, Head of Digital Strategy at Amwins

What is coopetition and how does it benefit innovation?

Keough: “Coopetition is a joint philosophy around the idea of bridging collaboration and competition to mutually benefit your company, industry, individuals, or stakeholders. The coopetition model of BTV is about bringing together like-minded and like-valued brokers, insurance companies, and wholesalers to share, provide insights, and propel the advancement of insurtech innovation forward through a collaborative movement.”

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Victorson: “When competitors who usually participate in competition are now working in cooperation to make something better, it allows you to take an outside-in lens. I think it works best when you start with the customer and work backwards to determine how they consume and interact with the industry. This can result in new ways of doing business. With voice-of-customer endeavors, our industry is often guilty of building proprietary solutions grounded in competition. It forces the consumer to interact with an individual way of doing business that is connected to legacy types of systems or customers. Coopetition can ultimately benefit an entire industry if we’re willing to take the abundance type of thinking and mentality we talk about at BTV.” 

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Bukowitz: “Coopetition is when competitors collaborate in a pre-competitive space. I believe that collaborating in this way is necessary to create the conditions for transformational innovation. I don't think it's required for incremental innovation at all, but I do think that coopetition has the potential to fundamentally shift the basis of competition across the board. Does it create a new playing field? Does it change the contours of the existing playing field? I don't know how dramatic the change is, but it moves for everyone who's competing at the same time. Gaining an advantage on the new field is a function of each of our companies harnessing our unique capabilities to compete.”

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Parsons: “Coopetition creates innovation by enabling the exchange of ideas, resources, and capabilities among competitors. Working together helps reduce costs and risks by sharing the expenses and uncertainties of developing new products or services. It can also increase the scale and scope of the market by creating inter-operability and compatibility standards that make the products or services more accessible and attractive to customers. This type of collaboration also helps us enhance the quality and diversity of our offerings by combining the best features and capabilities of each partner. We foster learning and creativity by exchanging ideas and feedback with other experts and innovators.” 

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How do you balance trust and confidentiality with collaboration and sharing experiences in an innovative lens?

Keough: “When we founded BTV, our foundational infrastructure was based upon Simon Sinek's book, ‘The Infinite Game.’ The idea is that a rising tide lifts all boats—and yes, there are rivals—but they are worthy. We have a great degree of trust in each other and in our intentions to move our industry forward for the better. Within the pre-competitive space, we also see an opportunity for brokers and carriers to share and learn from one another, which is incredibly valuable.”

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Victorson: “Often, trust and confidentiality naturally take care of themselves. That’s because when competitors get together, they quickly learn that things they believe are proprietary really aren’t, so there are many things you can collaborate on that don’t require trust and confidentiality. In those rare cases where you get into truly proprietary information, you have enough of a relationship with each other that you can have the requisite conversations ahead of time, so that you can get deep into the differentiators that require trust and confidentiality.”

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Bukowitz: “It's about how you create trust. Next year will be our fifth year with BTV. Being in the same room and at the same table with brokers, other carriers and wholesalers has created this feeling of trust. When I think about balancing trust and confidentiality, what's interesting to me is that it's not really that hard, because we share so many common challenges having to do with people, processes and technology.”

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Parsons: “Trust and confidentiality are essential for successful coopetition, as they enable the partners to share sensitive information and resources without compromising their competitive advantage or exposing themselves to opportunism. There are best practices to follow, like establishing clear and mutually agreed-upon goals, expectations, and boundaries. Using contracts, non-disclosure agreements, and intellectual property rights can protect proprietary information and assets of each partner. It’s also important to build trust and rapport through frequent and honest interactions, mutual respect, and recognition of each partner's contributions and achievements.”

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How do you balance competition and cooperation in an organization like BrokerTech Ventures?

Keough: “We talk about what is open game for discussion in the pre-competitive space, which we believe is 85 – 90 percent of the inner workings of each of our firms. The remaining 10 – 15 percent is an organization’s secret sauce or competitive advantage. This is a highly competitive industry, but there is value in strategic partnerships that allow us to innovate and expand offerings while maintaining a competitive edge.”

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Victorson: “Honestly, it takes care of itself. Because we came into BTV as competitors, we really worked on what the concept of coopetition looked like, for example, the cadence and frequency of meetings, the ways we would connect members of our respective firms, the types of projects we would work on. So, a lot of connection and trust has been built early on. I don’t know of a situation where any one of us has stepped over the line. There’s just so much opportunity to build friendship and trust. When you have that in a business setting you can solve a lot of issues. Of course, this is a highly competitive industry. You can still compete with one another. There’s no question that competition sharpens every aspect of your business.”

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Bukowitz: “We don't go to the market without brokers. They are our path to market. We are their path to product. So, the common challenges of people, processes and technology create common ground for cooperation. When we talk about how to create value for our shared customers, we're talking across the value chain. So, it's not so much what we do. It’s the ‘how we do what we do’. It’s our ability to execute. This is what’s unique to each organization because of a company’s culture, strategic priorities and operating capabilities. The way we get things done is different.” 

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Parsons: “I love how BTV members embrace cooperation by adopting a dual mindset that recognizes the benefits and challenges of both modes of interaction. On one hand, members see competition as a positive force driving them to improve their performance, differentiate their offerings, and satisfy their customers. On the other hand, members view cooperation as a strategic opportunity that enables them to access new markets, technologies and capabilities, and to create value exceeding their individual efforts. By aligning their incentives and interests with the overall vision and mission of BTV—to foster innovation and collaboration in the insurance industry—members create a true win-win situation benefiting themselves, the organization, and the industry as a whole.”

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How has the collaboration between competitors in BTV ultimately led to actionable insights for you?

Keough: “We have ‘labs. by BTV community’ that supports the innovation efforts of the employees and individuals who are working hard each and every day to support our clients. It has created a cross-collaboration and information sharing amongst our broker, carrier, and wholesale firms to derive actionable advice and throughput, and to advance insurtech solutions at a much more rapid speed. Certainly, any one of us could go at this alone, but to do so amongst incredibly respected industry peers will only advance our industry faster.”

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Victorson: “It’s one thing to get the ‘what’ from people at a meeting or seminar or cocktail hour. It’s another thing when you have the type of friendship and relationship where they let you into their ‘how.’ When businesses get a chance to learn from each other in terms of how they analyze and assess innovation and how they’ve deployed it to serve the customer, their trading partners, and colleagues, that’s when it has a big impact on your organization.”

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Bukowitz: “For us, it’s a deeper understanding of agency operations which we, as carriers, don't see in our day-to-day interactions. As part of BTV, we get to see when several brokers are interested in pilots with the same startup and we learn that this common problem is a real pain point. This gives us insight into a challenging aspect of their operations that is probably the same for other agencies that we do business with that aren't part of BTV. Then we can explore how we might be able to take the solutions that the BTV brokers are finding, testing and using and share them with agents representing our company. This has led to truly actionable insights for our company. There is this new frontier that BTV is pushing us into where we can collaborate.”

Parsons: “The collaboration within BTV provides us with a ton of actionable insights. BTV offers many opportunities to work closely with our retail agents, helping us better understand their needs and align our investments in technology to provide the best retailer experiences. Listening to our retail partners discuss tangible problems and debate the effectiveness of accelerator start-ups in solving these issues is incredibly practical.”