Ben Luckett set up Aviva's venture investment arm in 2014 and has been running it since, surviving four changes of CEO. Here are 7 lessons to take from Aviva how to build a venture unit with long-term resilience.
Aviva did not set out to build a textbook corporate venture fund. It began, instead, with a strategic anxiety: what happens to a 300‑year‑old insurer when technology can potentially transform the entire business model? From that starting point in 2014, the UK-based insurer has built a corporate venturing capability that has survived four chief executives, spawned a regulated long‑term asset fund and become a backbone of its wider innovation agenda.
According to Ben Luckett, who founded and still leads the activity, the secret was to resist treating corporate venture capital as just another asset class. It was framed instead as a deliberate, long‑term bet on understanding the future – with investment as the means, not the end.
Venture investing is the best way to understand and get close to emerging technologies, says Luckett. “You could pay a consultancy a million quid to turn up with a PowerPoint. Or you could put money into a programme where people are actually testing and learning and developing. You’ll get a lot of insight — and you can get a good financial return as well.”
1. From curiosity to corporate venture thesis
Aviva’s venturing effort got its start in 2014, when a new senior leadership team became interested in seeing whether emerging fintech companies would become a disruptive force or a catalyst for positive change within the incumbent community.
That curiosity translated into exploratory moves, including a now-familiar technology tour of the US West Coast.
Within Aviva’s general insurance business, the future of the core model was coming under active scrutiny. Luckett – then working in general insurance – was asking about how emerging technologies, for example ubiquitous video surveillance through Ring doorbells and cameras, would change the business model.
Maija Palmer
Maija Palmer is editor of Global Venturing and puts together the weekly email newsletter (sign up here for free).
