Christopher Lowell is head of the Small Business Innovation Lab at The Hartford, a role he took five months ago.

Before taking roles in the insurance industry in 2012, he worked for Bain & Company as a strategy consultant for a variety of industries across the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. At Bain, he gained insights about how to build and distribute different products internationally and got an external view of how different business models proliferate for a variety of industries across different countries.

Lowell also worked at Explorica, an educational travel startup company, leading their China program—bringing students over from China to either the U.S. or Europe for multiweek summer language and educational courses. “That startup experience was all about building something fast, realizing that decisions must be made quickly in an evolving and dynamic environment, and that you’ll naturally make mistakes and fixing them is just part of the business,” he told Carrier Management.

After coming to the realization seven years ago that “insurance was one of the ripest industries for excitement and change,” he joined Liberty Mutual as a leader of corporate strategy and research. At Liberty, Lowell said he learned the insurance business and led initiatives focused on specific areas that will dominate the future of insurance—autonomous vehicles, blockchain technology, IoT and smart cities.