Chairperson’s Corner: Looking Forward to 2023

By Arthur da Silva

Innovators & Entrepreneurs, February 2023

As we enter 2023 and hopefully put behind us quarantine measures, travel restrictions, and social gathering restrictions, we look forward to a year of renewal, opportunity, and reinvention. Firstly, I’d like to thank the section’s members that have continued to support us over the past couple of difficult years. Also, many thanks to the outgoing council members and outgoing Chair, Blake Hill, for their volunteerism and contributions.

Coming out of our annual planning meeting at the beginning of December, we reiterated our purpose that ties together the focus of our planned content, that is: to deliver educational information to inspire and enable the innovators and entrepreneurs among us and encourage new ways of thinking and doing.

Recap of Events and Offerings

We had transitioned from having virtual to in-person events in 2022, including:

• Virtual networking events co-sponsored with other sections discussing topics such as effective communication for actuaries. Past years have covered climate change, blockchain, amongst other topics.
• Two webcasts covering how to amplify your message in a world of rapidly changing technology, and how to launch your start-up.
• Multiple issues of our newsletter touching many topics relevant to people interested in innovation and entrepreneurialism.
• Chicago architectural boat tour at the SOA Life Meeting and section breakfast at the SOA ImpACT Meeting.

In addition, we continue to maintain our discount to LegalTemplates, a resource to help entrepreneurs access boilerplate templates of numerous contracts they might need when running a company.

E&I Members Survey

We also launched our section member survey in the fall of 2022 to gather information around desired content and information on how you engage with us. We noted a large portion of our members are interested in all of the topic categories we had initially planned, i.e., internal and external entrepreneurialism, how to move an idea to implementation, and making innovation accessible to everyone. We also received many submissions of interesting actuaries to reach out to for potential newsletter articles, webcasts, and podcasts—so, thank you to all those who submitted ideas.

With respect to preferred medium of consuming content, the newsletter was by far the first choice, with webcasts and recorded presentations coming in second. However, there is a sizeable amount of members who look at podcasts as a desired secondary outlet.

We noted a couple of areas for improvement:

• Update our podcasts—We will be piloting the re-launch of our podcast service and evaluate whether there’s sufficient interest in E&I podcast content.
• Increase multi-directional engagement—Starting with our LinkedIn group. Yes, we have a LinkedIn group and it is open to everyone. Sixty-nine percent of respondents have not visited our LinkedIn page, and it would be nice to reverse that trend. To contrast, only 33 percent have never visited the section webpage.

Looking Forward

As alluded from the results of the section member survey, we will be piloting some new or refreshed initiatives and evaluating the results. We’re hoping to increase our webcasts to at least one per quarter and continue to release our newsletter articles in a similar cadence compared to the past. Themes that we hope to cover across all mediums will include: Career spotlights on actuaries in innovation or entrepreneurial roles, how to innovate, how to pitch an idea, how to build a company, start-up pitfalls, tools and techniques to foster innovation, collaboration models, and more.

Our biggest challenge is sourcing content to fill up our content pipeline for this year and beyond and you can help. We invite all of our section members to nominate someone (yourself or someone else) that you think our section members would be interested in hearing from, particularly surrounding the topics listed above. If you have someone in mind, please do reach out to me using my contact information below.

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers

Arthur da Silva, FSA, FCIA, is the chair of the Entrepreneurial & Innovation Section Council. He is also a senior manager and actuarial innovation lead in Deloitte’s Actuarial & Insurance Solutions practice in Toronto. He can be contacted at arthurdasilva@gmail.com and at his LinkedIn.