Measure business innovation through assessment

Measure business innovation through assessment.

The world of insurance is highly regulated and complex; the insurance industry requires a lot of knowledge and expertise. In a market with high competition, an insurer needs to be innovation-focused, continuous learners and capable of transforming these learnings into action. An insurer needs to optimize its product, find ways to improve it and develop products to keep up with the fast-phased industry. The insurance market is changing rapidly, that it becomes difficult to maintain a competitive advantage.

When it comes to innovation, insurance companies make few mistakes. Insurance companies seldom introduce variations to an existing product or operations that shows little relevance to current customers and business needs. Often these changes are aimed at improving products from an insurer’s perspective while losing the focus on meeting customer needs. It can lead to poorer outcomes for customers and antipathy toward insurers in the long-run.

Let us discuss a bit about agile methodology. Agile methodology has become commonplace in digital development. The framework helps teams deliver high-quality software on time and within budget. The agile method has gained popularity because it allows teams to adjust course quickly than others, making them especially valuable for dealing with complex problems like building a new product or introducing a new technology or process into your business. Agile insurance is a one-to-many collaboration of teams, with members from different business units and areas of expertise, to deliver new insurance or re-engineered products into the market in a continuous fashion. The key to success lies in adapting to constant change while providing excellent customer service. We are now in the world of the agile insurer. Back in the day, a typical time to market a new product or service was around 2-5 years. Today it is less than six months. Product cycle time has radically reduced, and the pace of innovation has become ever faster.

Innovation occurs when a company faces radical changes in market needs, trends or consumer expectations. However, most companies only take measures against this change when their revenue forecast starts reducing substantially. This situation puts companies at risk of changing too late or not changing at all.

Innovation is central to development yet complex to measure and monitor. Planning, tracking and using metrics to drive innovation is a clear way to increase the number of successful implementations and decrease the time it takes to create business innovations.

So how can an insurer distinguish an innovative product?
How do insurers measure and monitor innovation?

The data that matters to businesses collected in the organizations like revenue, profits, customer satisfaction, volume, client retention by paying clients or percentage of churned clients, number of hours worked per employee/contractor, projects completed on time and more. In the same way, an insurer can also calculate the innovation a business needed.

Some industries evaluate a company’s innovation by divided into assessments section:

1. Leadership:
According to Mckinsey, in a survey, more than seventy percent of the senior executives say that innovation will be at least one of the top three drivers of growth for companies in the next three to five years. The process of developing and leading innovation is complex. It involves making risky investments in a changing environment while pressing ahead with business-as-usual. Innovations developed through this process almost always carry the seeds for next year’s transformation, or they are the results of the previous transformations. For business innovation, leadership plays an important role. Be it bold new products, facing tough competition, or fighting off disruptive threats, leadership is always required to make innovation succeed.

2. Culture:
According to Forbes, culture is the heart of organizational innovation. The need for innovation in the insurance industry has never been more apparent. In recent years there have been many exciting innovations in the insurance landscape, and there will be plenty more yet to come. No culture can be innovative without great people. When it comes to business innovation, senior executives believe that culture is more influential than the tool business uses. The culture of a company is just like a living person that needs to change with time to survive better in the modern business world.

3. Resources:
The insurance and reinsurance marketplace is one of the most competitive and fast-moving sectors in business today. To maintain a dynamic competitive market for analysis of capital flow and encourage innovation. There should be a formal review of resources like allocation, strategy, and management to support individual innovators, generic groups of innovators, firms and industry bodies in the industry. Proper allocation of resources accelerates innovation.

4. Processes and structure:
There has been a hype in the insurance industry recently about innovation. With all the industry talk about the need to be innovative, however, there has not been sufficient focus on the two main reasons for the lack of innovation: processes and structure. Evolving processes and highly structured insurance businesses are significant factors for a successful digital transformation.

Businesses and most corporations are structured to deliver things that already exist. It seems logical, but it is wrong. Innovation requires creating new things with new and different processes. Each product manager, each developer, and each designer will have one team that works with them. As they create their products, they need to build in a process for doing so – this might include creating tools that enable ideas that don’t exist now to be brought forward in a way that allows them to happen.

Conclusion:
Innovation means doing ordinary things in a novel better way, like rethinking an existing idea to find a new approach. Innovation is assessing from multiple angles—leadership, culture, resources and processes and structure—to gain thorough insights on its effectiveness.