Innovating Insurance

A few weeks ago, I mentioned an upcoming IBM Institute for Business Value study, and now it is available: “Innovating insurance: Lessons from the world’s leading innovators”.

Insurance has traditionally been slow to innovate. Or if you prefer a more liberal interpretation of innovation – as we did in our 2010 study “Solving the innovation puzzle” – innovation in insurance has been incremental and internal rather than radical and disruptive. The insurance industry has always enjoyed a set of protective characteristics that have inoculated it from greater disruption:

• Regulation
• Scale and the law of large numbers
• Personal relationships
• General customer inertia

The question today is whether these characteristics, together with incremental innovation, are enough?

In our new study, my colleagues Lynn Kesterson-Townes, Anthony Marshal and Indranil Nath argue that the many micro-disruptions happening right now along the insurance value chain will add up to stronger industry dislocation, and we show how it is happening in other formerly protected industries. Based on a survey of more than 1,000 C-Suite executive globally, we then examine how the world’s leading innovators differentiate themselves to be the ones reshaping rather than reacting to disruption.

Hope you have an interesting read, and comments, as always, welcome.