Whether Pioneer or Follower both strategies can achieve success. To ensure optimal innovation outcomes, however, Oxbow Partners challenge insurers to question their innovation strategies and set the right objectives.
The first stage is to measure your innovation capabilities compared to your peers. That will help decide whether pioneering or following is the best decision.
Whichever choice you make there is one critical success factor. The digital platform you adopt MUST support agile change. Must support the ability to trial and learn from failure. MUST let business users change workflows and processes. MUST allow fast:-
- Specification & Configuration
- Testing and Iteration
- Production Deployment
- Adoption by internal and external customers
- Continuous improvement
All without an army of vendor developers and consultants on site.
AND: -
Must include embedded analytics to measure outcomes, processes and supply chain efficiencies to ensure the right decisions are made and acted upon.
It is one thing to have the right goals and strategy but without an agile digital platform it is just a plan.
We believe that companies need to set clear objectives for their innovation strategy to ensure that they achieve real impact. At the highest level, a company needs to make two decisions: Does the company, as a whole, want to be a pioneer or follower in its industry? In what areas does the company want to be a pioneer? Surprisingly few companies have a clear view of where they want to be pioneers, and how this impacts the way they think about and organise their innovation activities.
http://www.oxbowpartners.com/pioneer-follower-importance-setting-objectives-innovation-strategy/
