On innovation and leadership, Maddie Grant
Maddie discusses a post on Museum 2.0 blog: Innovation, Chaos, and Leadership: Skunkworks and the CEO. Maddie gives a good overview of the Museum 2.0 entry, but you should read both.

Billion Dollar Innovation, Jeneanne Rae
This is an article from December 7, 2007, that I ran across this week searching for interesting innovation articles.  Jeneanne discusses the report: Seizing the White Space: Innovative Service Concepts in the United States (86 page pdf file). The four industries they looked at where:

• Insurance and financial services
• Professional services
• Wholesale and retail trade
• Logistics

A good quote from her article:

Key findings of the report included the Internet emerging as an important distribution channel in almost every case. The services era has ushered in service availability whenever and wherever you like. Although the majority of these companies were not dot-coms per se, investments in cultivating online business were the norm for this group of innovators.

In a larger context, information technology has become the new factory for service businesses in that automation helps to "productize" (i.e., make more repeatable) innovative concepts. IT also helps scale services. We saw relatively small investments in the development of IT engines beget enormous returns because of the potential to add new customers and transactions globally at very low cost

Innovation that matters for insurance, Don Tapscott and Jamie Bisker
Don and Jamie discusss innovation in the insurance industry focusing on IT efforts.  A good quote from the article:

The innovators are getting beyond using IT for cost control (as has traditionally been the focus in the insurance industry). Rather they are embracing the new paradigm in technology to forge new business designs that improve their offerings, ability to market, distribution channels and risk assessment. Innovation often means deciding to use relatively new or even existing tools in new ways to produce the desired positive change. Innovation can and should include areas such as product and services improvements, as well as new business processes or reviews of corporate culture. Some of the most interesting and predictive cases of this phenomenon have occurred in the last five years.

Innovation is a luxury, Bankervision
Interesting discussion on how some companies see innovation as an "expensive luxury" and therefore something that can be cut when they need to save money ...  Mentions a five stage capability model for innovation teams:

1. Innovators as Inventors
2. Innovators as influencers
3. Innovators as entrepreneurs
4. Innovators as Thought Leaders
5. Innovators as Sponsors

A good quote from the entry:

... in the course of my research that I'd consider are pretty close to this position. But far, far more that aren't. Most of the time, it seems, bank innovators don't realise they have to get beyond Innovators as Inventors.

E-Business Emerging as Winner in P&C Insurers IT Investments, US Insurance News
Discusses a report by Novarica about IT investments in insurers' policy administration systems.  The report is titled "Budgets, Benchmarks, and Business Priorities for Insurer CIOs 2008: US Property/Casualty Edition".  A pdf preview of the report can be downloaded here. A good quote form the US Insurance News article:

The survey showed that:

• Overall IT budgets are holding steady at 3 percent of premium. External spending was a little over half of the average budget.
• Agent e-business was the across-the-board winner for systems delivering the best return on investment over the past 18 months.
• 71 percent of respondents shared five top priorities: policy administration system replacement, e-business, PAS enhancement, underwriting, or supporting a new line of business.
• The most common area insurers reported as “under evaluation” was predictive analytics across multiple areas.
• Web 2.0 user-content areas showed up high as “under evaluation,” but with a very low incidence of actual projects. Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, were being implemented by more than a third of respondents.

Driving Innovation in the Insurance Industry, CIO Zone
Article about a study done by David West: "The Digital Chauffeur: Real World Principles of Innovation for the Insurance Industry", some of the report's content is available at The Digital Chauffeur.  A good quote from the article:

The direct result is that through this innovation insurance carriers have been able to better reconstruct events that took place at an accident and, in the process, better determine appropriate damages and deter fraud. As vehicle manufacturers implement further safety systems, such as systems to detect if a vehicle is approaching another vehicle too quickly and is in danger of being involved in a crash, more information will be at their disposal.