RIMS’ Conference Exhibitors Face Off in Start-Up Stadium

The RIMS 2019 Annual Conference Exhibition dedicated a section of its RIMS Marketplace — called the Start-Up Stadium — to emerging start-up exhibitors. (Courtesy RIMS)

The more than 400 exhibitors who filled the Boston Convention & Entertainment Center at the RIMS 2019 Annual Conference & Exhibition know a lot about risk. But some of were putting more on the line than others.

For the first time, RIMS dedicated a section of its RIMS Marketplace — called the Start-Up Stadium — to emerging start-up exhibitors, said Stuart Ruff-Lyon, CMP, DES, RIMS vice president for events and education.

Stuart Ruff-Lyon

Six of the companies demonstrated their technologies during “RIMS Tech, the Insurtech Competition,” a “Shark Tank”–style showdown judged by an expert panel of risk professionals. (The winner was a company whose product delivers real-time data about eight different environmental metrics to construction site managers.)

Ruff-Lyon told Convene the experience taught him “about risk on a holistic basis — and not just from an insurance standpoint.” He’s more familiar with crisis management, he said, and “more comfortable” with risk registers, decision trees, and other-risk management terms and practices.

The most important lesson learned, Ruff-Lyon said, was that risk can be a positive. “If you look at your risks through a positive scope,” he said, “you often find new solutions and new revenue opportunities.”

Barbara Palmer is Convene deputy editor.

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