Collaboration is the watchword of insurance leaderstoday—because it's increasingly viewed as key to growth,innovation, operational efficiency, customer intimacy, and otherstrategic goals. Senior insurance executives are starting todiscover opportunities all around to collaborate—with consumers andbusiness customers, with their supply chain of agents and brokers,with their suppliers of information technology and business processservices, and within their own organizations' ranks.

Collaborative relationships with other companies have been a keyenabler of Homesite's strategy of rapid growth—by adding value andcreating efficiencies that complement the company's corecompetencies.

“We made a decision early on that outsourcing and partneringwould be a fundamental part of our growth,” explained Peter Settel,chief information officer at Homesite Insurance, during aPropertyCasualty360 roundtable discussion held this summer inCambridge, Mass. “We look to partner with companies that canintegrate with us and create some technology advantage that goesbeyond what we have. Scale, efficiency, automation, that createssome value for us. Not just checking boxes and doing due diligence,our people have to be creating value and showing how thatoutsourcing is making things more efficient.”

Collaboration is expanding on many levels. Strategic alliancesare increasingly common among insurers, who use formalizedpartnering to penetrate new markets or augment capabilities. As inother industries, insurers also are turning to collaborativebusiness processes, technologies, and corporate cultures as a meansof fostering internal teamwork, sparking innovation, andstrengthening external relationships. Even the explosion of socialmedia relates directly to collaboration—consumers are collaboratingonline with their peer communities to make more informed choices,and insurance companies, agents and brokers are figuring out how tointeract in this new world too.

At the highest level of strategy, insurance companiesincreasingly turn to collaboration as a means of sustaining growthand profitability while adapting to a rapidly changing andtumultuous landscape. Facing many powerful forces of change, andmany new competitive threats, insurers must understand what they dovery well and what they must change—and partner with otherorganizations that play to their strengths and make up for theirweaknesses.

“Collaboration and partnership, how do you use them to redefinethe organization?” is a key question insurance leaders must bewilling to ask, according to Denise Garth, executive vice presidentfor North American strategic marketing and industry relations andglobal head of market strategy at Innovation Group. “What's yourcore competency and how do you determine how to partner with theright people? Understanding that will help your agility.”

Insurance companies are also partnering outside their industryto find new avenues to reach and serve insureds—by focusing onconsumers that insurance company shares in common with othernon-insurance companies. Such collaborative marketingpartnerships—with the help of social media marketing—have bornefruit for Direct General, which has dubbed the strategy “sociallocal.”

“We try to partner with other industries that serve the samecustomer,” explained Tom Kaschalk, chief claims officer for DirectGeneral Insurance. By offering coupons on social media inconjunction with supermarkets, dry cleaners, car title stores, andother local businesses across the southeastern U.S., Kaschalk'scompany is exploiting an inexpensive distribution channel andcreating “lot of brand awareness” in the process.

Collaboration can be a powerful force inside the insurancecompany—helping break down organizational silos, sharinginformation and ideas across the ranks, and creating “this giantcollaborative environment where everybody is participating,” saidEllen Carney, Forrester Research senior analyst serving eBusiness& channel strategy professionals.

Increasingly, insurance leaders recognize that a combination ofcollaborative culture, processes, and technologies are essential tofinding solutions to a constant stream of new business challenges.Futurist David Smith called it a “natural flow of conversationwithin the business” that smart companies seek to foster up, down,and across their ranks.

“Innovation is this year's thing,” explained Smith, who is CEOof Global Futures and Foresight. “Some organizations are veryattuned to loving new ideas, are energized by new ideas. You findthese people all over the place, but mostly in the junior ranks.They haven't left and haven't been fired yet. They're passionate,talking across the organization.” The key question, he said, isthis: “How do you enable people inside the organization tocollaborate? If you get the hang of that, you're going tosucceed.”

John W. DeWitt is a contributing editor and event moderatorfor Tech Decisions, Claims, and otherNational Underwriter publications. Michael Burke iseditor-in-chief of JW DeWitt Business Communications in New Salem,Mass.