Sometimes we get in our own way. We think our ideas are crazy and rationalize them away because we see too many hurdles to overcome. Before we know it, we’ve tossed aside an idea that could have made an impact, that could have been transformative. And that practice is not serving us or our clients well.

To help our clients address risks that stand in their way, we often need to get out of our own way. And we need to think big. Call it “blue sky thinking” or brainstorming without restrictions. No ideas are shot down immediately. In fact, in this brainstorming approach, we are more receptive to creative ideas regardless of whatever constraints might present themselves. We’ll worry about the obstacles later on.

The insurance industry needs more blue sky thinking. We need to grow more comfortable with stepping away from our thoughtful underwriting ways to uncover totally new ways to tackle our clients’ operational and risk management challenges. More importantly, we need to act on some big ideas. That is going to strengthen the relationships we have with our clients and elevate our purpose and relevance in our clients’ risk management efforts.

I have seen a big “blue sky” idea get pushed to become a recent reality and lived to tell about it. From the experience, we can all learn some valuable lessons that, I hope, can keep our industry thinking big and less mindful of limitations.

No Room for the Status Quo

New technology has been a game-changer for many industries. From retailers to manufacturers, operations have changed. Whole new industries have emerged. Even our own insurance industry has implemented everything from AI to online platforms to enhance what we do every step of the way, from underwriting risk to handling claims.

The construction industry has been a little slower in adopting new technologies. For the most part, the industry is still building the same way it has been for decades, with very little innovation, many inefficiencies and still far too many injuries and fatalities. Then COVID-19 entered the picture.

A new study from New Horizons Foundation, which is the research arm of the Sheet Metal & Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association (SMACNA), found that implementing COVID-19-related safety preparations and protocols at jobsites is not helping contractors’ productivity or profit margins. SMACNA members took a 17.9 percent hit to their productivity since the outbreak started, turning their potential profits to 7 percent financial loss on the average project. According to the report, during an average eight-hour day, one worker lost 85 minutes dealing with COVID-19-related protocols.

In the corporate world, we saw how years of “remote working” resistance eased up when lockdowns went into effect. People and companies alike have been shocked at how seamlessly their teams pivoted and productivity was maintained. Everyone thought the status quo was fine and a fully remote staff wasn’t possible—until it was the only way to work. All of a sudden, it worked. This shows us that our preconceived notions about what’s possible are often clouded by “what has always been.”

We saw a parallel pivot in construction technology adoption: lots of resistance before COVID-19, then when the pandemic hit and using technology to maintain social distancing and contact tracing became the only way to keep building, technology companies pivoted quickly, and contractors found a way to adopt it swiftly and effectively. It can be done. Still, with super thin profit margins, many contractors have neither the financial or technical resources, much less the time, to invest in research and development of new technologies. They need to remain focused on safely delivering quality projects on time and on budget.

We saw our construction clients’ technology conundrum. The number of new technologies flooding the construction market is overwhelming. Sifting through what’s available to find which brings the most value to their business could prove challenging, time-consuming and expensive. We wondered: How could we help? What if contractors could rely on a partner in risk like their insurance provider, to perform some of the heavy lifting? From our perspective, tech adoption could have a big risk-reducing impact that would benefit us both.

A Big Idea Emerges

We looked to find a way that we could kick-start that evolution by equipping our customers with the tools, resources and consulting support of our risk engineers to navigate the vast and daunting world of construction tech. This way we all get there much faster. We knew there would be challenges, but we kept pushing forward.

After some “blue sky thinking,” the idea of a Construction Ecosystem emerged. It’s well known that construction is an industry with a lot of complex risks. On projects small, midsize or large, owners and contractors have to cope with the effects of weather, supply chain issues, equipment problems, site safety conditions, regulatory compliance, budgetary concerns and, of course, project deadlines. It’s a lot to track.

Various technology tools offer efficient ways to address these areas individually. But what if they were all connected? A truly revolutionary way to help bring certainty to construction projects and manage project risks is a digital technology ecosystem, a platform of interconnected technologies to help a historically tech-averse industry reduce risk and boost efficiency.

Test Driving Technology

Technology solutions are continuously streaming into the market. Ironically, construction technology developers (or at least technology that developers thought could help the construction industry) had a good grasp of construction and its possible needs. That being said, it is amazing how different partners bringing their experiences together can shape entirely new tech solutions.

That’s exactly what happened when a tech startup called Weather Analytics, now Athenium Analytics, approached us. The startup used extremely advanced tools to predict weather with incredible specificity and detail and thought we’d be a perfect match to assist in underwriting weather insurance. But we did not have an appetite for weather insurance; instead, we saw another opportunity.

Weather can have a big impact on construction businesses, not to mention a construction insurance book of business. Bad weather can delay construction projects, and given the scale of our clients’ projects, a one-day delay could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars lost or more. Or a gust of unexpected wind could bring down a crane and injure workers or bystanders. Oftentimes, when a contractor bids on a project, they need to estimate the number of workdays they will lose to weather-related work stoppages. As some major construction projects can go on for years, the ability to more accurately predict the impact of weather can be impactful.

Acting on Feedback

We weren’t shy about sharing our thoughts with Athenium, whose team took our feedback to heart. With no construction background when they first introduced themselves to us, Athenium dug in and learned what they could about how their tools could empower contractors. They even built a new application of their weather data and analysis suite specifically geared to the construction industry, called GaugeConstruction, which could generate weather analytics to help protect a construction project from the impact of weather.

To make sure the new solution was viable and valuable to our construction clients, we put it to the test, launching a pilot program with three customers. In the end, the pilot gave us and Athenium a much broader understanding of how the tailored solution could be leveraged and opened the door to learning things that they might have never considered before. As a result of the pilot, we gathered a wealth of real-world experience and even more feedback to further refine the tool.

Athenium made some meaningful changes to help go beyond insurance. They took the solution from a group of separate weather-related tools to an integrated suite while adding and adjusting functionality and usability. They also had a breakthrough capability that allowed construction firms to accurately predict lost days when bidding on a project using science.

Our pilot with Athenium started a trend. The pilots are only made possible because clients are dedicating the time to put new tech to the test, providing feedback to make improvements or to even shift the whole way of using the technology. An important lesson learned here is that the biggest ideas are not the work of one but the collaborative effort of a few.

Since then, we have continued to conduct pilots to test technology solutions in a real-world setting—Pillar Technologies to test on-site environmental sensors, OnSiteIQ, Smartvid.io, Water Intelligence (WINT), to name a few. The continued pilots further confirmed what the ecosystem needed to be: a single place where contractors could log in to get access to interconnected tools and data that gave them insights that they could act on. But we decided it needed to be even more.

Where Do We Stand?

We were still missing a way to provide them with valuable benchmarks to compare against industry trends and best practices. So, as more of our clients began to look at implementing technology, we also developed an assessment that would allow them to benchmark their tech adoption against their peers across different categories. Called the Technology Adoption Maturity Index (TAMI), it provides a technical measure of a contractor’s propensity to adopt technology.

Another valuable benchmarking addition was aggregated, anonymized claim data provided by Sedgwick. With Sedgwick’s extensive experience in adjusting claims across workers compensation, property and other construction claims, they could provide masked data to give contractors using the ecosystem an idea how their claims history compared against industry peers. It also gives our construction risk engineers more guidance in how they can steer their efforts to help our clients minimize their exposure to these claims.

Building Support for the Big Idea

Clients have been important sounding boards from the beginning. During our regular Customer Council Meetings, a gathering of our largest clients, we kept them continuously apprised of our progress, introducing them to individual technology providers on a regular basis to gather first impressions before we even moved it along to the pilot phase.

Our team presented the concept of an ecosystem to everyone at the council. Even just a concept, the Customer Council strongly supported the idea, further proving that there was value in it because they realized the potential it could offer their companies. For us, it provided an opportunity that could prove our commitment to being a valued partner rather than just a payer of claims.

Over time, we saw a lot of tech tools with big potential. As mentioned, what we realized is that tech solutions could provide a lot more value to our clients if the tools were brought together, interconnected on a platform that would give us a big picture of their risk.

Ecosystems are a popular topic today. A few years back, when we began this journey, it was still a very new idea, especially in commercial and specialty lines. The idea of an ecosystem is one in which a series of tools and providers come together to create a unified offering to the market that has more value as a whole than in pieces. AXA XL’s Construction business, which includes nine business lines, was in a unique position to try to build an ecosystem. The team had multiple areas to bring in many different tools or could identify individual tools with benefits across a number of areas.

Final Thoughts

AXA is committed to taking a “payer-to-partner” strategy to move from being just a payer of claims to becoming a partner in managing risks. Since its inception in 2010, the construction team has operated as a risk specialist with deep expertise in the construction space. The ecosystem, from its development to its inception, offers the opportunity for even tighter partnerships with our clients.

Construction is a cornerstone of economic growth. It is one of the largest industries in the world, but it is not known for being the most innovative industry in the world. The insurance industry plays an important role in assuring that this high-risk industry can keep performing. But maybe it can also help assure that contractor clients are performing more optimally than ever before. It’s a big idea, but it’s definitely possible.