The key event of the Social Data Lab is the quarterly Social Data Summit, a day-long workshop that brings together all our members. The Spring 2011 Social Data Summit, titled The Future of Insurance, considered the potential role of social data in creating systems that are proactive instead of reactive, predictive instead of descriptive, and focused on changing behavior, rather than at best recording it.
Questions addressed at the Summit:
What are the opportunities and risks of using social data in marketing, sales, and product development?
How have customers changed their ways of making decisions? What are the implications for traditional companies?
How should we redefine "customer-centricity"?
Will companies built on information asymmetry be replaced by companies built on information sharing?
It also included industry-specific considerations:
How can social data impact how insurance is bundled, offered, and priced?
Should information disclosed on the Internet influence an individual's insurance coverage? What are the ethical considerations of doing so?
Notable Summit Guests:
Mike Sha, CEO of Wikinvest, revealed how social data has triggered a fundamental shift in power between brokerages and their customers - a major disruptive trend predicted to quickly spread to the insurance industry. By sharing sensitive personal information with aggregator sites like Wikinvest, customers are able to instantly benchmark their brokerage provider's performance against the wider industry
Greg Wolff, executive director of the Una Mesa Foundation, outlined the benefits of emergent micro-insurance business models
Brian Knutson, associate professor at Stanford, drew on cutting-edge research in affective neuroscience to suggest innovative systems that reduce risky behavior
Ron Gutman, CEO of Healthtap,discussed how the sharing of interactive and independent health information by patients can facilitate behavior change
Marisa Nelson, of 23andMe, shared how the personal genomics company is going beyond standard genetic testing, by engaging with unique patient groups, and using the data collected from them to conduct rapid research.
The Spring 2012 Social Data Summit will be related to the EMC/Greenplum Data Science Summit (held May 23rd, 2012 in Las Vegas). Please email aweigend@stanford.edu if you are interested in participating.
