The Power of Nonconventional Thinking in P&C Technology Innovation

Lisa Wardlaw recently joined me for an episode of my InsurTalk podcast series to shed light on her approach of tapping her liberal arts background to help organizations innovate new and sustainable revenue streams fueled by next-generation technologies.

She knows a thing or two about innovation. As founder of consultancy 360 Digital Immersion and North America advisor for InsurTech Israel, Lisa draws on 25 years of global insurance and cross-industry experience leading transformation efforts in finance, operations, and digital business organizations.

With insurers facing mounting pressures from inflation, heightened competition, rising consumer expectations, and economic uncertainty, this is no time for conventional, linear thinking. In Lisa's view, in an industry known for requiring deep expertise, adding some "longitude" to its "latitude" is critical to spurring innovation. Specifically, she believes in "building radically different, unprecedented business models with the tools of the future." And that means bringing in talent and ideas from nontraditional sources—and focusing on the "why" instead of the "what."

Identifying a problem and applying solution "X" will only get you so far, Lisa says. Real innovation isn't about looking at things as they are, but about looking at how they could be. It's a lot less tweaking and a lot more rethinking. "When we went digital, we were running on the treadmill," she tells me. The problem: Once carriers went digital, the prevailing mindset was to figure out how to use it to get that treadmill to go faster.

"We said, ‘'Let's make it go from a 1.0 on the treadmill to a 2.0 on the treadmill, or maybe to 2.5," she says, adding, "What we really needed to do was say, 'Let's get off the treadmill.'" During our conversation, Lisa shares how insurers can apply this kind of unconventional thinking to create compelling and differentiated value propositions that generate a meaningful competitive advantage. Click below to listen to the full conversation.

InsurTalk: Innovating in the Insurance Marketplace