A 2017 survey by the Society of Actuaries found that insurance carriers are spending at least $2 million (USD) and ten months from development to launch when bringing new products to market.
These kinds of investments leave little room for error. And despite what product features consumers say they want and what technologies they say they are willing to adopt, carriers never really know how customers will react until a product hits the market. .
Life Design Sprints are focused innovation sessions designed to conceive new ideas, select those most likely to work, build prototypes for testing, and learn from results with real customers. Rooted in design thinking, lean methodology, and speed, this approach helps partners accelerate innovation by:
With Life Design Sprints, ˿ƵAPPX is changing the insurance industry’s approach to innovation. Participants must reach outside their comfort zones in a highly productive, creative environment aimed at generating impactful ideas and delivering real results. Life Design Sprints produce concrete, tested output to address well-defined customer problems in days rather than weeks or months.
In 2019, ˿ƵAPPX published a series of articles on the about Life Design Sprints to increase awareness of this powerful new approach to innovation acceleration:
“To ensure more people get covered and in an effort to close the coverage gap, we need to ensure we tackle the right problem.”
“When you have a wicked problem, design sprints enable you to develop and test solutions rapidly in a collaborative environment. They remove the barriers associated with brainstorming and enable you to make progress towards tackling what can feel like an overwhelming challenge.”
“Right now, carriers are using Life Design Sprints to solve modern insurance problems, to design solutions people want to buy, and to create new value for insurtech startups and insurance institutions. Let’s break down how design sprints cultivate a creative environment in which people can truly deliver.”
“Marketers refer to the purchasing process as a customer journey for a reason: It isn’t an instantaneous event but a trip full of considerations, distractions, and off-ramps. Keeping the customer focused and invested requires us to reexamine our products and processes through the applicant or claimant’s lens. The effort can be transformative, but it can be difficult as well.”
“The formula for design sprints combines three key elements: a specific mindset, the right people in the room, and a series of exercises extracting individual insight and group consensus. The outcome is reduced corporate risk, increased organizational alignment and buy-in, plus innovative insurance solutions on firm footing to get to market faster.”
“Think about what it is like to introduce a new way of thinking to your team or organization, and the challenges you might face. While facilitating Life Design Sprints at ˿ƵAPPX, I have witnessed a fair amount of resistance to change, but there are ways you can overcome and even prevent it.”
