EP36 - Why the Most Regulated Industries Demand the Most Creativity
Creativity and insurance are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. When they are, it is often to suggest a contradiction. Regulation is seen as rigid. Creativity as free. The reality is more nuanced.
In this Episode:
Creativity in insurance is not about disruption but about leadership, culture, and execution. Francois Jacquemin reflects on how regulated environments still require creative systems that deliver lasting value to clients.
Highly regulated industries do not eliminate creativity. They redefine it.
In some markets, regulation dictates nearly every aspect of a product. The structure. The guarantees. The contractual mechanics. From the outside, it appears that all players are offering the same thing. And yet, outcomes differ significantly. That difference is rarely accidental.
When product freedom is limited, creativity shifts elsewhere. Pricing efficiency. Distribution models. Cost structures. Service layers. Client experience. The invisible architecture behind what looks identical on paper.
In those environments, creativity becomes a discipline rather than a burst of inspiration. It is the ability to redesign value chains with precision. To ask where friction can be removed. Where effort can be reduced. Where relevance can be increased without breaking trust or compliance.
This kind of creativity does not belong to an innovation department alone. It cannot. A brilliant idea that sales will not carry or operations cannot administer is not innovation. It is theatre.
Sustainable creativity requires alignment. Across departments. Across countries. Across partners. And crucially, across mindsets.
Some of the most effective moments I have witnessed came from structured exposure. Teams prepared in advance, sharing real examples from their markets. External voices brought in not to impress, but to challenge assumptions. Surgeons explaining precision through technology. Entrepreneurs showing how they learn from failure. Technologists listening as much as they speak.
What mattered was not the tools. It was the openness.
Leadership plays a decisive role here. Not by directing creativity, but by legitimizing it. By creating a culture where people feel invited to contribute, to borrow ideas from other industries, and to invest time in improvement beyond their immediate role.
Creativity in regulated industries is rarely loud. It is quiet, deliberate, and deeply collaborative. It is built through trust, curiosity, and execution discipline.
Regulation draws the boundaries. Leadership determines what happens inside them.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction: Creativity in the Insurance Industry
00:24 Challenges in the Japanese Life Insurance Market
01:15 Creativity in Pricing and Distribution
02:26 Digital Economy and Insurance Innovations
05:18 Fostering Creativity in the Workplace
07:11 Collaborative Innovation and External Influences
10:43 Conclusion: Sustainable Creativity in Insurance
François Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
Creativity and insurance? No, this is not a contradiction. Although, yes, sometimes the insurance industry and the insurance ecosystem suffer from a bad image as a very traditional, bit boring, not very creative. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not so true.
If I take, for instance, the life insurance segment of the market in Japan where the regulation is so heavy that insurers do not have from the outside a lot of room for being creative because the rules are set in a way that most of it is fixed by the legislator and evolves step by step. The whole insurance body is approving the modification. However, the products are not all the same. So the part of the product, which is more like the price maybe, is influenced by what the insurer can bring on the table. Whether it's some additional services, but most of the time is the low price for the same product because in terms of the shape of the product there is not much room for creativity, then the price is key.
To create efficiency on the price level, insurers internally and in their relationship with a distribution need to be very creative. So is that going to be a product which is sold standalone or more like with other products as part of the whole target of the distribution, et cetera, to decrease maybe the level of the commission, the level of the inherent cost of administration for the insurer, so that there is value that is created for the client.
So on the one hand, there is no room or not much room for creativity. On the other hand, in that very small area which is the freedom of the insurers and the ecosystem, there has to be a lot of creativity to create that efficiency, that appeal. So there's give and take there.
Or for instance, let's take the digital economy and, more particular, a global cloth retailer. You buy your clothes or your shoes online and then, oh my God, if it's not working or if I don't like it, I can send it back. You can ship it back. Let's say this exists for the last 15, maybe maximum 20 years, but in insurance, this element of giving back what you've bought because you don't like it exists for much longer in Europe, in the nineties. This what they call the right to cancel the contract or to renounce the contract that you can say, "Okay, oh, I bought this contract but I don't want it anymore," so I cancel it in the first 14 or 30 days. You can say, "Oh, I don't like this." And then what you get is your money back and the contract's canceled unless you've been insured, but most of it for life or disabilities. You can cancel the contract. In the US, the first law allowing renunciation dates back to 1972. So it's like more than 50 years.
So sometimes the digital economy and sales online is not so creative, because it happened before in insurance. So eat your heart out, creative so-called online economy. It existed before. They take elements of what they find somewhere else to fit their own needs.
What I'm saying by this is not creating competition or winning something for the insurance industry. What I'm doing here is trying to explain that in the insurance world or outside, in different industries, the creativity is not something that you have alone as a standalone, as your silo, or in your innovation department. But that creativity and the ability to use that creativity in meaningful solutions for clients is not something that happens standalone. Creativity is the ability to bring ideas from different parts of the ecosystem or even from different industries, and to be able to assemble them in your value chain with the ability to deliver a meaningful product and meaningful solutions for clients which create the appeal and which would either expand your client base or ensure that the clients are staying for a long period of time with you as a product provider.
In my experience also, how to foster that creativity is an important step. So it's not something that just happens on a daily basis when the employees are going to the office and say, "Oh, I'm going to be creative." The creativity needs to be fostered. And it's the duty, I believe not only from the innovation team, but from the top management of the company to support that creativity, those creative moments. It's not necessarily the duty of the CEO to organize all the seminars and choose which external people or internal employees are going to speak in those seminars, but it's the duty of the CEO and the top management to create the cultural environment internally and the awareness and the openness, pushing the staff to be open, to be creative, to be open to make suggestions, to be open to take on their own time to bring solutions forward. That can be rewarded by implementation.
It can also not be happening as a standalone. It's not only the job of the innovation team and department to push and implement the solution, the innovation. It needs to happen throughout the whole team. Innovation alone, creating a super innovative product that cannot be mastered and administered or even where, for instance, the sales team and the sales director are not convinced and do not want to propose it to distribution, is useless. So the key there is really to bring people from various departments internally, but also externally, to find a creative element and to be able to influence each other to have a product, a service, a combination of product and service that will be on the one hand well received by the client base, well received by those distribution teams that will provide that to the client, but also that is solid in the administration and in the services to the client.
The one thing that worked really well is when we had a seminar, we had a moment where we as a team, as internal employees coming from various backgrounds and departments or even different countries, were talking about what innovation means for them, being able to demonstrate what they've done in their own country or what they think about that. So there's preparation work with concrete elements here and there so that the mind of the internal team is already set into really sharing, co-creating already, and then you have external stakeholders of the insurance ecosystem that were coming.
And when I say insurance ecosystem, there were surgeons coming showing something that they created, especially with tech companies and 3D printing, so that their way of operating on patients was much more precise. They had the ability to repeat and prepare the operation so that they're fully prepared for a better success rate when they're operating clients. So we were receiving that type of demonstration. We had futurists coming, we had AI companies, we had plenty of different companies that were coming demonstrating what they could do. And of course they were coming to do business with the insurer. But not only for that. They were also there to actually get feedback from us on what we think is working and what is not working. So they could benefit from the exchange with a lot of professionals from different backgrounds. And they were fine-tuning their service, their product, their way of selling their own solutions.
And for us as an internal team at the insurance company, we were able to jump from being ready to co-create at the beginning of the seminar to actually delivering a more meaningful outcome, conclusion, having better discussions afterwards, and then having a better mindset to create better solutions when we're back in our departments, whether it's in the same country or another country.
So it was preparing ourselves. This cultural change was pushed by top management. There were a lot of external parties that were there to enrich our discussions. Sometimes you were doing business and always we defined new solutions, and then those solutions or those products were then implemented afterwards so that there was really something—a lot of work in advance and concrete outcomes at the end.
But that's something that always has to work not as a silo, not as a standalone person or a small team of people, but throughout the company with internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. That's the best way to deliver and ensure sustainable creativity in the insurance industry.