The race for the killer app in insurance

Remember the must read book “Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance” by Larry Downes and Chunka Mui? I was lucky to get a signed copy at a Diamond Technology Partners event and hear them speak about the killer app. It was in 1998, the start of the eBusiness revolution, with the emergence of the Internet as a platform for a new business model. Every company was holding executive management strategy sessions discussing the book and brainstorming. In the insurance industry, many were putting up their first websites and beginning to think about eBusiness opportunities that could become their “killer apps.”

Many insurance companies failed in this effort. Their vision wasn’t big enough. Their desire to upend existing models wasn’t strong enough. Rather, they thought incrementally and reservedly. This resulted in strange hybrid solutions, such as websites with no integration to backend systems. Requests were printed off and manually put into the systems. Many companies wasted time on vaporware ideas that never got off the ground due to organizational angst or a lack of leadership. It was an exciting and painful time as we recalibrated our thinking toward an entirely new era of business. In spite of our efforts, we fell a lap or more behind in our race toward innovation.