Strategy Meets Action (SMA) has been hosting and posting articles on emerging technologies, emerging trends, and innovation for our clients for a little over year.

The SMA Next-Gen Innovation Discussion platform now has over 1,000 posts, organized by specific topics, including technologies such as wearables or drones; trends such as the sharing economy and new business models; and open innovation, innovation best practices, and many others. These posts, thoughtfully selected from thousands of sources around the world, are a good vantage point from which to examine the evolution of our connected world and how businesses, individuals, and governments are reacting and adapting to new opportunities and new realities.

An analysis of these posts yields some useful insights on how these areas are progressing, and how they are resulting in game-changing implications for the insurance industry. There are several key takeaways from a review of the topics and conversations over the last year plus.

    1. Among insurance executives, there is high interest in understanding the trends and technologies, and determining their implications for their companies.
    2. The "Internet of Things" (IoT) has consistently been the emerging technology with the highest number of posts, which makes sense given the very broad range of IoT devices and use cases, and their implications for every line of business in insurance.
    3. Wearables have garnered high interest from the beginning, but have seen a significant spike in posts over the past 6 months due to the increasing availability of devices, growing adoption, and the high potential for insurance.
    4. Activity related to new payment technologies continues to increase as more options are available and businesses and individuals begin to accept the new forms of payments. Many insurers are also following developments in the underlying blockchain technology and evaluating the potential related to secure documents and transactions.
    5. More of the posts now relate to specific insurance company examples or uses cases, instead of just updates on technology progress or examples in other industries.

The activity in the 1,000 posts also parallels our SMA research, which shows that insurers believe the IoT, wearables, and new payment technologies will pass the tipping point in insurance within 3 years, indicating their potential to transform the industry. Many other technologies and trends are of high interest to subsets of the industry, such as drones, the sharing economy, driverless vehicles, and biotechnology.

Especially noteworthy is innovation—it is becoming more the accepted norm rather than something new to try. This is important because creating a culture of innovation, cultivating open ecosystems, and experimenting with new business models and technologies are broadly recognized as mandatory for success in the digital, connected world.

Editor's note: This article first appeared on StrategyMeetsAction.com and is reprinted here with their permission. Click here for the original post.

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