Insurance Innovation Assessment Model: Process Based Approach (Part I)

Innovations determine corporate competitive advantage in every field of activity, which also applies to insurance companies. The innovativeness pursued by insurers is to a large extent derived from the innovativeness pursued by their clients. When providing insurance services for non-financial entities, insurance companies often support their clients’ innovative activities. Thus, they perform an important economic function, also from the macroeconomic perspective. The development of tools for the assessment of the level of innovativeness in insurance companies seems legitimate. The assessment of this kind could actually be used in diagnosing the innovativeness potential of an insurance company as well as the whole insurance sector. The results of such an assessment would facilitate the creation of ranking lists of innovative insurers and could also provide information about how adequate the insurance sector is in view of the contemporary economic determinants. The main problem connected with the assessment stems from the fact that an insurance product and anything related to its concept, i.e. implementation, marketing and controlling of results, is the resultant of the innovativeness of internal processes and activities within an insurance company. These activities are often insurance specific. Only a comprehensive approach to the subject can solve the problem. The main aim of the paper is to describe the first stage of development of insurance innovativeness assessment model, whose concept is developed in stages. The present stage includes the creation of a universal map of all internal processes and activities pursued by an insurance company. It is a starting point to create the tool called the InZu model, which can be used to model and assess the innovativeness level within an insurance company. Eventually, the concept and the tool are to enhance the broadly perceived sustainable economic development of companies within the insurance sector.