Wozniak is an innovation icon and his simple axiom "focus on what people want" should be a mantra for insurers.  Why?- to anticipate the products they need e.g. as auto insurance migrates from owners to ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and insurance as a service. 

How could you justify innovation in insular labs, hubs and teams? How could you have developers/coders without domain expertise innovating away? How often are solutions created that are looking for a solution to solve?

How often does a digital claims skunk works start with some customer interviews, look at future trends and then try and re-configure some complex and inflexible digital claims platform? How often does it takes a year and $1million of more to go from idea to deployment only to find customers and the competition have moved on?

Effective iterative development requires a fail-fast/fail-often digital claims platform. One which empowers trained claims handlers and business analysts to build (without the need to code) customer journeys and delightful  UX in days and weeks rather than month and years. To test them, iterate and perfect and continue that virtuous circle of innovation and deployment.

Black box thinking and iterative development that listens to employees and customers for ideas that encourage skunkworks innovating in the real world.

Too many of the current crop of digital claims platforms allude to the business user being able to iterate and improve workflows and processes. In reality they foster a waterfall approach in agile wolf's clothing. They allow configuration rather than innovation ending up with a unique version of the software that cannot be easily upgraded to the vendor's current release. Hard and expensive to maintain.

A critical success factor for innovation and iterative development is digital claims on a No-Code Digital Platform. Or at the very least low-code. What is the acid test to see if you are in that spot. These are real-life.

UK subsidiary of global insurer with goal to "Go Digital and Go Online" with a "Make my Claim" button on website for self-service FNOL. 12 months later the HQ announce they are coming over next couple days to audit the new UX and customer journey. Panic.... Not just GI but Commercial and we have nothing built nothing in the last 12 months!

Luckily they did have a technology partner that could built and deployed the journeys and UX. Pride meant the insurer had tried to build themselves but necessity drove them to use the partner which deployed in days ready for the audit team to award high-fives and top score. Could you really achieve the same? 

If not you will slip behind in the innovation stakes until one day slipping customer satisfaction scores and deteriorating COR and other ratios will put you into the lengthening tail of unprofitable insurers.

Read more about No Code Platforms at "The Low-Code/No-Code Movement: More Disruptive than you Realize".