In 2006, the Willis Research Network (WRN) pioneered a new approach for the risk industry: creating lasting partnerships with academia to turn leading-edge science into actionable risk insights.
Launched to coincide with the Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous, the WRN became the first large-scale, multi-partner collaboration between academia and the risk management industry.
A response to a new era of cat modelling
The WRN emerged in response to a profound shift in the insurance and reinsurance market during the 1990s: the rise of catastrophe modelling.
A defining moment was Hurricane Andrew, which caused $15.5 billion in insured losses in 1992. The storm exposed the dangers of relying solely on historical data and contributed to multiple insurer insolvencies. In response, the industry increasingly embraced physics-based catastrophe models to assess, manage and price risk.
But as catastrophe modelling became widespread, a new challenge emerged: understanding the variability, uncertainty and limitations of model outputs themselves.
A different kind of partnership with academia
The WRN was a bold public-private partnership, incubated in the UK before going global. It was created to explore the relative merits and limitations of different modelling approaches; identify unmodelled risks and provide science-backed solutions for an increasingly complex world.
The WRN was a bold public-private partnership, incubated in the UK before going global.
Understanding risk increasingly required expertise spanning climate science, engineering, geophysics, hydrology and finance. Emerging risks could no longer be understood through isolated expertise or historical data alone.
We couldn’t have experts on everything, no single institution had sufficient breadth to answer all our questions or a monopoly on the greatest minds.
Partnering with academia gave us access to the best talent and advances in public science; linking leading research centres into a tightly managed and effective network would help us respond quickly to the evolving risk landscape faced by our clients.
Willis adopted a longer-term view: the bridging the worlds of science and business to access knowledge previously beyond reach, while investing patiently in research relevant to the evolving needs of the risk industry.
The shift was from transactional projects to long-term partnerships - from applying existing science to co-creating new knowledge.
Themes that still matter today
WRN partnered with seven leading UK universities to support clients in meeting the challenges of catastrophe risk in a world of climate change, increasing exposures and rapidly advancing science.
Long-term arrangements gave Willis privileged access to scientists at world-renowned institutions, covering all aspects of natural hazards exposure and their financial consequences.
The initial themes are still very relevant today: improving flood model modelling (Bristol University), including climate projections into tropical storm modelling (Reading University), understanding event correlations (University of Exeter), representing building stock vulnerability (Cambridge Architecture Research), earthquake modelling (Imperial College), niche perils such as landslides (Durham University), and geovisualisation to support decision-making in the face of uncertainty (City University).
From science to actionable insights
20 years of the Willis Research Network
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To translate academic research into actionable insights, the WRN acts as a bridge transporting knowledge between the worlds of science and business. This bridge has endured because it works both ways. We provide direction and focus to our research partners by channeling questions from our clients. But we also listen to new ideas from academia and constantly scan the horizon for promising areas of research.
This translation is hard work. The link between science and business relies on a human chain: passionate, curious and collaborative people turning knowledge into practical risk insights and risk management solutions. A multi-disciplinarity focus broke down barriers between groups of experts that would otherwise never have met and solved problems together.
Over the next 20 weeks, our series “20 years of insights” will feature some of those advances, which benefited the wider industry, not just Willis. This was a gamble: “You want us to fund public science even though results will be published and available to all our competitors? “. We are grateful to those inspired leaders who understood that the greater good is not incompatible with competitive advantage. The gamble paid off and many followed (or tried to) in our footsteps.
A bold idea that paid off – 20 years on
Twenty years on, the WRN is stronger than ever. While we have evolved with the risk landscape, our core principles are unchanged.
Beyond a core of natural catastrophe research, WRN expanded to a wider range of risks (AI trustworthiness and governance, geopolitical risks, emerging risks, supply chain); start-ups complements our academic collaborations; research feeds more readily into consultancy and model evaluation (in the early days, WRN was banned from running cat models).
Yet the founding principles endured while we successfully curated leading-edge research and operationalised it (supporting early-career scientists, publishing peer-reviewed research, multi-disciplinarity collaboration). We also still face the same challenges: finding the right partners; thinking ahead to spot emerging risks before they hit the headlines; and communicating scientific insights without putting your audience to sleep, distilling the key insights and translating them into the language of risk managers.
Passionately curious, the WRN stands ready to ask (and answer) more questions for the next 20 years.
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To translate academic research into actionable insights, the WRN acts as a bridge transporting knowledge between the worlds of science and business.