Strategy & Management · Business Model & Innovation Strategy

Two Models, One Firm — Brightwell Insurance

You are the CEO of Brightwell Insurance plc, a £1.2bn UK broker-led motor & home insurer with a slim 6-point underwriting margin (94% combined ratio).

4 rounds Executive English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

You are the CEO of Brightwell Insurance plc, a £1.2bn UK broker-led motor & home insurer with a slim 6-point underwriting margin (94% combined ratio). A digital-direct entrant — Swift Cover Direct — is 18% cheaper, has passed 600,000 customers, and is draining your under-35 future book.

Over four board quarters you decide whether to run a second, direct-digital business model alongside the broker core; how far to separate or integrate it (Markides' separation-vs-integration dial); how to resource it with the ~£45M build budget and scarce digital talent and management attention; and how to manage cannibalization, broker channel conflict, and the board's hard 97% combined-ratio ceiling.

Wrong strategies underperform for the reasons Markides predicts: launch with no structure and the core P&L quietly starves the venture; over-separate and you forfeit 38 years of pricing data, capital and brand; refuse the second model and you protect this year's margin while conceding the future; ignore the broker network (88% of premium) and a revolt destroys the core faster than the disruptor ever could; tolerate unlimited cannibalization and you mistake value transfer for value creation.

A live scorecard tracks combined profit, combined ratio vs the 97% ceiling, cannibalization rate, new-model growth, and an organizational-conflict index, so the board defense in the final round is fully computable. For executive education, MBA strategy electives, and senior leaders of incumbents facing business-model disruption.

Who it is for

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Adopt a second (direct-digital) business model?
  • Separation dial — how autonomous is the digital unit?
  • Shared assets the two models will draw on
  • Pricing & claims data (38 years)
  • Balance sheet & capital
  • Brightwell brand
  • Underwriting & claims operations
  • Resource the second model under the 97% margin ceiling
  • Build capital, this year (£M of the ~£45M / 2yr)
  • Digital talent moved to the venture (FTE)

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • CEO Decisions
  • Quarter-by-Quarter

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Business Model & Innovation Strategy.

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