How to Innovate: Injecting Innovation into Planning

Like businesses everywhere, insurers are being challenged to deliver a constant stream of innovative products and services. Unfortunately, innovation in insurance has been inconsistent, undisciplined, and improperly governed. What can be done to change this?

The latest report from Celent looks at how leaders in innovation are using a common definition of innovation and discrete, transparent processes to build their programs. In most of these companies, innovation is a key consideration in strategic planning.

“Using a portfolio management model has helped our customers adjust their long-standing planning methods to consider innovation from a different perspective,” says senior analyst Mike Fitzgerald, who coauthored the report with Celent senior vice president Jamie Macgregor. “The Innovation Portfolio Model provides an analysis of the distribution of priority initiatives according to their strategic intent and the type of innovation being pursued. In multiple instances, this view yields new, valuable insights.”

“We categorized more than 280 insurance projects and, no surprise, found a strong bias toward improvement projects. In a steady-state industry, this may be acceptable. However, given challenging business economics and the rapid pace of technological change that faces insurers, this result ought to be challenged hard by the leading companies,” says Macgregor.