I recently had the opportunity to host a meeting of the Novarica Innovation Advisory Board. Insurance IT leaders from across the country met and shared perspectives on fostering innovation both within their own companies and in the industry at large. For this session, we were also joined by Loïc Houssier from DocuSign, who shared his insights on structuring innovation with a particular emphasis on the critical influence of culture in directing the arc of innovation.
Bringing Innovation Into a Mature Business
Not every organization is able to start from scratch when it comes to innovation. This is especially true for insurers. Insurer organizations are used to thinking about traditional metrics and cost containment as part of their “business as unusual” operations. True innovation requires organizations to rethink KPIs and resources.
Loïc discussed approaching innovation through each of four sequential quadrants: the productivity zone, the innovation zone, the transformation zone, and the performance zone. The focus of the productivity zone is cost reduction, establishing business processes, and often portfolio management. The innovation zone sees incubation of ideas, POCs, and general investigation of new products. The transformation zone can help POCs become a priority and enables scale of new businesses, products, and revenue streams. This particular zone doesn’t “exist” all the time as companies may not yet be in need of scale or transformation. The final zone is the performance zone, in which a product can bring in revenue and improve general business performance.
The Role of IT
Insurers are innovating on product, which requires IT involvement. As Loïc put it, product innovation needs to be brought to the IT side as well. The problem is that IT is usually seen as a cost center and tends to live in the above-mentioned productivity zone.
IT departments are often hard-wired to focus on traditional ROI metrics and cost-benefit analysis, yet it’s important to note that these may not be the best indicators of success for innovation initiatives. The goal should be to push IT toward enabling more transformation. In order to do this, IT not only needs to know the business, it needs to be tied to it. As my colleague Novarica VP Nancy Casbarro noted, “IT knowing the business isn’t just fashionable, but the key to success and innovative solutions.”
Diversity as Imperative to Culture
Innovation for many organizations means rethinking existing processes and operations from the top down. A key component in this fabric of innovation is culture. Yet this culture shouldn’t be a monolith. Loïc discussed the importance of diversity in bringing in different perspectives and creating stronger organizations.
As an example, he pointed to the diversity of thought in DocuSign’s engineering teams. Some engineers are self-described extroverts, yet some of the best engineers are also introverted and may contribute more outside of a team meeting than in it. As Loïc put it, “You don’t just want to bring in people like you. You need to bring in people who will challenge you.”
Novarica’s Innovation Advisory Board has produced illuminating conversations and knowledge-sharing around innovation best practices and how insurance can continue to innovate, even in the face of a pandemic. If you’re an insurer interested in our next meeting of the Innovation Advisory Board, it takes place on July 14.
We’re also looking forward to getting back to Silicon Valley in 2022 for our guided “immersion experience” innovation tours. More information can be found here. If you have questions about the Innovation Advisory Board or Novarica’s Silicon Valley innovation tours, please email me.
Add new comment