Innovation Isn’t Disruption. It’s SpaceX Wanting NASA’s Money, and NASA Wanting SpaceX.

Recorded ahead of ITC Vegas 2024, this conversation with Bill Harris and Drake Slaikeu-Lawhead of InsureTech Connect ran on a space theme — that year’s show theme — and it turned out to be a genuinely useful lens for talking about how innovation actually happens in insurance.

The framing crystallized around a real-time news story: NASA’s Boeing Starliner mission had left two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station, with a return delayed into 2025, while SpaceX quietly picked up the slack as NASA’s other launch partner. Bill’s point cut against the obvious “legacy company loses to scrappy startup” read: SpaceX isn’t trying to replace NASA. It wants NASA’s money, and NASA wants SpaceX’s capability. The insurance equivalent isn’t the fintech “we’re here to eat your lunch” posture that early insurtechs like Lemonade led with — it’s partnership, because in Bill’s read from inside the industry, insurance innovation is fundamentally collaborative, not adversarial.

In Episode 124 of InsurTechTalk, Bill, Drake, and I covered how ITC organized this year’s show floor into curated neighborhoods, the launch of ITC Agents for independent retail agents, and how the show’s satellite ecosystem of unofficial parties and meetups has grown as large as the official program itself.

About Bill Harris and Drake Slaikeu-Lawhead

Bill Harris is an executive at InsureTech Connect, the organization behind ITC Vegas and its international editions, and has been with the show since near its founding — this was ITC’s ninth edition. Drake Slaikeu-Lawhead joined ITC two years before this recording after 17 years in conference production at Clarion, and leads growth for ITC’s newer curated programs, including ITC Agents and ITC LatAm — the latter following eight weeks he spent traveling across Latin America meeting the region’s insurance community in person.

The Neighborhood Concept

The core organizational change for 2024 was breaking the show floor into distinct, curated neighborhoods rather than one undifferentiated expo — something Drake describes as having emerged partly by serendipity the prior year, when core systems vendors and geospatial companies happened to cluster together, and attendees responded well to it.

For 2024, ITC built this deliberately around four curated programs:

• ITC Agents — new this year, aimed at independent retail agents
• ITC Brokers — an extension of the existing Broker Tech Connect program, built with partner Broker Tech Ventures, serving larger brokerages (Hub, Acrisure, Lockton, and similar)
• ITC LatAm — folded in from a standalone Miami conference the year before
• Life, Annuities & Group Benefits — expanded from a smaller track into its own dedicated neighborhood

The logic, per Bill: when you go shopping for a suit, you want all the suits in one place, not scattered between the pajama racks. Grouping exhibitors by category isn’t just convenient for buyers — it helps people find their professional “flock,” the peer conversations that happen organically when an innovation lead runs into other innovation leads, or a claims specialist bumps into other claims people.

Why Exhibitors Don’t Actually Mind Being Near Competitors

I raised the obvious objection: wouldn’t a company want to avoid being placed next to its direct competitor? Bill’s answer draws on retail geography — commercial districts and shopping malls cluster similar businesses together because it increases foot traffic for everyone, rather than diluting it. Someone looking for “the Salesforce of insurance” who finds a cluster of similar vendors is more likely to comparison-shop right there than to wander off. In practice, Bill said, real objections to this kind of placement are rare.

ITC Agents: Solving for a Different Cost-Benefit Calculation

The most significant new program this year addresses a gap Drake identified directly from attendee feedback: independent retail agents attending ITC in the past found little built specifically for them.

• Retail agents have a fundamentally different relationship to the industry than enterprise buyers — different technology budgets, different customer relationships, and a much harder cost-benefit calculation around spending roughly $4,000 and five days out of the office
• ITC Agents runs as a separate, lower-priced full day of content on the Tuesday before the main Wednesday–Thursday expo, styled around “how I built this” conversations with successful agency owners — practical, implementable takeaways rather than big-picture keynotes
• The ticket includes expo floor access starting Wednesday afternoon, so agents leave the content day with a roadmap for which of roughly 700 exhibitors are actually worth their time

Drake’s framing: this was the last major piece needed to make ITC a genuinely full ecosystem event — investors and insurtechs at the founding eight years ago, and now carriers, brokers, technology vendors, and independent agents all under one show.

Vegas as the Sun, Regional Shows as Planets

We extended the space metaphor to explain how ITC’s regional shows relate to the Vegas flagship — Bill’s “hub and spoke” model.

• Vegas remains the flagship: the biggest stage, the widest range of amenities, and headline entertainment (Boyz II Men closed the show that year)
• Regional shows in Japan, broader Asia, and London serve markets with different regulatory environments and more localized carrier and vendor relationships
• ITC LatAm previously ran as its own standalone conference in Miami (900 attendees the prior April) but has now folded into Vegas rather than continuing as a separate show — treated as having served its purpose as a regional beachhead

The choice for an exhibitor or attendee comes down to what they need: a company just starting out and needing maximum visibility wants the biggest stage possible; a company wanting a more surgical, focused audience may prefer a smaller regional show.

ITC LatAm: One Day, Three Languages, Built From a Backpack Trip

Drake’s account of building out ITC LatAm was one of the more memorable stories in the conversation. He spent eight weeks traveling across Latin America meeting as many people in the regional insurance community as he could — noting candidly that he had no personal standing in the market; the ITC name alone opened doors.

• ITC LatAm now runs as a one-day content program on the Tuesday before the main expo, translated simultaneously in Spanish, Portuguese, and English
• ITC deliberately brings together both the Brazilian (Portuguese-speaking) and Spanish-speaking Latin American insurance communities in the same room — something Drake noted most regional events don’t do, for cultural and business reasons rather than any political one
• Over 300 people had already registered for the 2024 edition ahead of the show, with a dedicated zone, happy hour, and even a soccer penalty shootout competition

The Satellite Ecosystem: A Show Around the Show

One of the more counterintuitive points in the conversation is how much of what happens during ITC week isn’t organized by ITC at all.

• Roughly 60 independent parties, dinners, and receptions happen around the official show each year — wine tastings, happy hours, guest-speaker gatherings — all organized by exhibitors and partners, not ITC itself
• ITC’s role is largely to provide the “center of gravity” (Bill’s phrase, extending the space metaphor) that makes it worthwhile for companies to plan these events during ITC week in the first place
• ITC does help coordinate more targeted meetups directly — connecting, for instance, the LatAm delegation with the Broker Tech Ventures group at a scheduled time — where organizers know and trust each other

Advice for Navigating an Overwhelming Show

Attendee feedback that the show felt “too big” had, in past years, been treated by organizers as an acceptable tradeoff for scale. This year, Drake said, they took it seriously — hence the neighborhood restructuring, plus a deliberate set of tools to help people manage the scale rather than just absorb it:

• A first-timers orientation, run both as a pre-show webinar and an in-person walkthrough — last year’s version drew what looked like several hundred people following a flag-bearing guide through the venue
• The event app, which goes live to sponsors first and then to all registrants roughly a week before the show — both speakers stressed filling your calendar with meetings before arriving, while deliberately leaving some blank space for serendipity
• 14 concurrent content stages, including a dedicated Life, Annuities & Group Benefits stage and the State Farm-backed startup pitch competition (10 finalists presenting Tuesday, with the winner presenting on the main stage Thursday)
• Deliberate unstructured time — both Bill and Drake recommended blocking a few hours with no meetings at all, simply to walk the expo floor and absorb what’s trending (their example: noticing how many companies suddenly have “AI” in their positioning this year that didn’t last year)
• New badge functionality for 2024 designed to prompt richer conversation starters between attendees beyond name, title, and company

Bill’s closing point on networking, which I’d add applies well beyond conferences: ITC is also one of the best venues in the industry for personal branding and job searching — whether promoting your current company or, just as usefully, promoting yourself if you’ve recently left one.

Key Takeaways

• Insurance innovation, in Bill and Drake’s read, runs on partnership rather than disruption — the industry’s version of SpaceX and NASA, not a fintech-style “we don’t need you” posture
• Grouping exhibitors into curated neighborhoods increases foot traffic for everyone in the cluster rather than diluting attention among competitors
• ITC Agents exists because independent retail agents have a materially different cost-benefit calculation for attending than enterprise buyers, and needed content built specifically for them
• Regional shows (LatAm, Asia, London) serve genuinely different regulatory and relationship needs than the Vegas flagship, rather than competing with it for the same audience
• The unofficial ecosystem of parties and meetups around a major conference can rival the official program in scale, and organizers can support it without trying to own it
• Taking “the show is too big” feedback literally, rather than treating it as an acceptable cost of scale, is what actually drove this year’s structural changes
• Deliberately unstructured time at a conference — walking the floor with no meeting scheduled — surfaces trend signals that a fully packed calendar cannot