A brand-new knowledge centre will help ICMIF member LB Forsikring, Denmark’s largest member-owned insurance community, find solutions that can help the company’s more than 400,000 members prevent injuries, damages or loss before they happen.
The Knowledge Centre for Prevention is the name of LB Forsikring’s new initiative that will help the mutual insurer towards its strategic goal of “making insurance redundant”, among other things by a shift from insurance and risk protection to prevention.
Over the next five years alone, LB Forsikring expects to spend around a quarter of a billion kroner on measures that will help the company’s members reduce or completely prevent damages such as water damage (ie flood) or traffic damage (accidents). The new Knowledge Centre for Prevention will create and document new knowledge on prevention. The collating of this knowledge, to a large extent, will happen thanks to collaboration with other partners including DTU – Technical University of Denmark.
Together with DTU, the first project has just been launched on behaviours linked to rising water and water damage.
“To be able to patch the holes in the roof, you have to know where they are. This applies to the individual homeowner, and it applies to us as an insurance company in general, when we look at issues like increasing groundwater, traffic safety and even areas such as stress and wellbeing for our 400,000 members. With the Knowledge Centre for Prevention, we are now increasing our own knowledge creation, at the same time as we largely share our knowledge with the outside world, on the challenges our members face and which society in general is also facing,” says Mikkel Frost Kopenhagen, Director of Strategy and Innovation at LB Forsikring.
Collaboration with DTU on climate behaviour
The new knowledge centre has just started its first knowledge creation project, which is helping DTU to acquire knowledge and data on perceived risk and attitudes to the need to reduce the risk of flooding through investment in climate adaptation. DTU says it looks forward to being able to share in the knowledge that LB Forsikring’s members possess.
“The idea of the project is to understand how people perceive the information they receive about the risk of floods and rising water due to storms or heavy rainfall. How does the information on risk affect their willingness to take action? The goal, of course, is to get people to take precautions so that we get fewer floods in the long run, but in the first instance, we examine people’s risk appetite based on the information they receive. Here, it has great value to have a large target group that is distributed throughout the country, and LB Forsikring has this,” says Professor of Climate and Economics Kirsten Halsnæs from DTU.
“The collaboration with DTU is a good example of how we want to collaborate with others to produce knowledge that creates value for all of our society. And we look forward to entering into similar collaborations with other educational organisations, NGOs, etc. who are working in areas such as climate, mobility and welfare,” says Mikkel Frost Kopenhagen.
The Knowledge Centre for Prevention has been established as part of LB Forsikring’s strategy and innovation department and the centre will be led by Kenneth Wolstrup from 1 April 2021.
