Having just announced a partnership with the startup Predictice for the creation of a Luxembourg digital legal encyclopedia, Marc Hotton, Innovation Coordination Officer at Foyer Group gives us an overview of the company’s innovation strategy and in particular the growing collaboration with startups.
Photo: Marc Hotton, Innovation Coordination Officer at Foyer Group, encourage collaborations with startups, as long as they create value / Credits © Foyer Group
Founded in 1922, Foyer is the leading insurance company in Luxembourg. How does the digitalisation of justice foster its development?
A key value of the company, innovation has always been a driving force for development at Foyer Group. Since 2017, Foyer has intensified its innovation strategy to better meet the needs of its customers and adapt to their new uses, among other things by relying on the possibilities offered by digitalisation. From the outset, all Group employees and agents have been involved in this approach, which aims to provide an ever higher quality of service, in a customer-centric approach. One area for improvement concerns, for example, the provision of digital services to our customers, such as the myFoyer mobile application and our new customer area. Many improvements also concern service quality or the reduction of processing times – to achieve the need for instantaneity that we have all become accustomed to – through the automation of our internal processes. Thus, when the opportunity arose to collaborate with legaltech Predictice, allowing us to participate in the creation of this first search engine specific to Luxembourg’s legal field, while enriching it with insurance data, our teams were thrilled (see our article “Foyer enters into a partnership with LegalTech Predictice to create a Luxembourg-based Digital legal encyclopaedia“).
The company will be part of the conference “Innovations dans le monde juridique luxembourgeois : état des lieux et perspectives” organised by the legaltech Predictice on November 25th. What does such an event bring to a Luxembourgish insurance company like yours?
I am a great believer in collective intelligence as a driver of innovation, even more so with the current crisis. We must share our experiences if we want to benefit from those of others, in complete transparency. This type of event gives visibility to our innovation strategy and stimulates exchanges and spontaneous contacts: On the one hand, if we know about our innovation initiatives, our openness and our ability to work with startups, they will be able to more easily propose solutions adapted to our strategy. On the other hand, our monitoring should not be limited to our sector of activity but should also draw inspiration from innovations in other industries.
I hope that at the end of this session I will have, as is often the case, contacts with innovation managers to share our visions, approaches and methodologies, and with startups to study how their solutions could create value for Foyer and its customers. My advice is to become as much a part of the ecosystem as possible. In Luxembourg, we are fortunate to have many events and opportunities to do so, and even a specialised media, Silicon Luxembourg.
The company recently decided to collaborate with Predictice. What are the main reasons for this decision?
Open Innovation is one of the pillars of our innovation strategy. It is essential to open up your innovation process to the outside world, because you cannot innovate well alone. In any case, this is the model we have chosen at Foyer, by creating our Innovation Hub on a collaborative innovation model. The Hub organises a governance of innovation that revolves around two main and complementary axes: internal innovation and open innovation carried out with the ecosystem. The ambition is, on the one hand, to bring all employees to be actors of innovation; and on the other hand, to take advantage of all the wealth of innovation with the startups, incubators, accelerators, clubs, which are also sources of inspiration.
We thus encourage these collaborations with startups, as long as they create value. This often involves carrying out a proof of concept to validate the relevance and effectiveness of the solutions, but also to reduce the risk and uncertainty associated with them. This way of proceeding allows us to anchor experimentation in the corporate culture which offers incredible potential for insurers to automate, or to predict, as is precisely the case with this partnership.
In addition to adopting a solution that should speed up our case law research process while making it more complete and reliable for the benefit of our clients, such collaborations also makes it possible to involve employees in innovation. Seeing and using this type of innovative solutions is motivating. It also makes certain innovation-related themes much more concrete in their eyes, because everyone hears about AI and robotisation, but it can remain very abstract and even frightening for some. Today, AI is used on top of their legal expertise, as a complementary tool. They are thus touching on the concept of the “augmented collaborator” which they have often heard about in our acculturation sessions and digital training courses.
For all these reasons, I can only encourage Luxembourg companies to carry out this type of collaboration with innovative startups such as Predictice.
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Conference registration
Any person who wishes to attend the conference « Innovations dans le monde juridique luxembourgeois : état des lieux et perspectives » can first register through the following link.
