Our path to innovation
Pensions and savings specialist Standard Life, (part of leading global investment company Standard Life Aberdeen plc) help clients invest for their financial futures. Our industry is evolving, and we have to ensure we are at the heart of this change. That’s where our business innovation team comes in.
We aim to combine Standard Life’s scale and resources, with the disruptive innovation methodology and lean UX usually found in start-ups to embed a culture of always challenging our current, and future, thinking.
The workshop
We’d like to share with you some of the tried and tested disruptive innovation techniques we currently use during our innovation sprints. These techniques will empower you and your team to leave your assumptions about your users at the door, and challenge your core beliefs about your product. Delegates will also learn how to enable their teams to come up with new ideas at a pace by gaining inspiration from outside your industry. The techniques are flexible and can be applied to everything from your next design workshop, to strategic UX problems such as new products and services.
To try out these disruptive innovation techniques in a real context we will be exploring the topic of ‘Disrupting Ageing’ – a theme very relevant to us at Standard Life. Life expectancy is growing and the retirement landscape is changing, which, as a company that offers pension and retirement solutions, poses – challenges and opportunities to our business in the near future.
- For instance, how can technologies like VR help us better understand our options at retirement?
- How can the Internet of Things and connected devices assist us later in life?
- How can we utilise AI to better serve our customer base and reduce costs?
About us
Matthew Dickson joined Standard Life in 2015 from a startup in London, attaining a place on Standard Life’s sales and marketing graduate scheme. Passionate about exploring the vast opportunities in the financial industry, it led to him helping to create the Business Innovation Team – solely focused on implementing new ways of working with the business to ensure Standard Life is primed to tackle existing business problems but is also geared towards being a major disruptor in the industry.
Tsvetelina Valcheva joined Standard Life in 2014 with a background in telecommunications and financial services. She now works for an internal consultancy within Standard Life designing websites for clients. She also looks at the institutional clients’ external website. Previously she worked on Standard Life’s direct customer’s online servicing team, and before that – its mobile app for customers. Follow Tsvetelina at @LinaValcheva
Standard Life Assurance Limited is registered in Scotland (SC286833) at Standard Life House, 30 Lothian Road, Edinburgh EH1 2DH. Standard Life Assurance Limited is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.