An international expert on helping companies thrive by adopting bold strategy changes delivered an urgent message Monday to insurance executives assembled at the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America’s annual meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Develop a culture at your company that has a “rebellious instinct for disruptive change,’’ said Luke Williams, professor of innovation and executive director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Too many companies “focus on incremental ideas,’’ which leads them down a narrow path, and eventually “their customers disown them,’’ he said.

Mr. Williams told the capacity crowd at Monday’s session that the status quo can be an obstacle to adaptation and success, and he spoke of what social scientists at New York University call “the self-similarity principle,” the bias that we all have to surround ourselves with people that reinforce our own point of view and “make us feel good about ourselves.”

He cited a 2007 study by researchers at Columbia University in New York that took a group of business leaders from different disciplines and encouraged them to intermingle, only to find that virtually everyone chose to interact with those from their own sector — bankers talking to bankers, accountants to accountants, and so on.

Such behavior is counter to new ideas, which must come from the sharing of information, he said. “If there is one thing we know about innovation it’s that this mixing has to happen,” he said.

He said that while he believes his audience has a vested interest in growth, not everyone is likely to have a vested interest in innovation — an idea he quickly eschewed.

“If you’ve got an interest in growth, you have to be interested in innovation, because it’s innovation that drives growth,” said Mr. Williams, adding that organizations must also find ways to increase the pace of innovation.

“The way you increase the pace of innovation is to increase the exchange of ideas,” Mr. Williams said.

He also stressed the importance of dealing with ideas that don’t work.

“Worry less about the success rate for these new ideas, because most of them are going to fail. The real metric of success isn’t your success rate, it’s your rate of experimentation,” he said.

He encouraged the audience, when gathering for next year’s conference, not to talk about all the new, successful products and services in the marketplace, but rather “talk about what bold new experiments you got started.”

Turning his attention to the theme of the conference, “Leading in an Age of Disruptive Transformation,” Mr. Williams urged his audience to welcome change as an opportunity.

Rather than avoid disruptive change, Mr. Williams said business people should embrace and even stimulate such transformation in order to continually adapt to ever-changing challenges in the business climate.

“Ideas are the recipes for change,” he stressed. “Ideas are subject to increasing returns,” he said, as opposed to material objects such as cars, which are subject to decreasing returns as their value drops over time.

He further encouraged listeners to use their time to generate new ideas. “Any energy you expend in your organization on a steady stream of bold new recipes, bold new ideas, is never time wasted,” Mr. Williams said, adding that businesses must also find a way for employees’ ideas to cross-pollinate each other.

“There’s never been a more important time to be experimenting with new forms and configurations of knowledge,” he said.