ITA Pro Magazine - November 2015

exists in the first place.

“Members realize collaboration and cooperation are important to exist today. If you are a big insurance company and spend a lot of money looking internally at how you might innovate, you may not be inclined to share that information, but there are individuals in those companies that would participate in some of the projects we would like to get underway,” he says.

Hartnett reports his intention is to reach out to smart individuals in various areas of insurance—underwriting, actuarial science, data science—and look at what would be an appropriate step for ACORD to undertake.

“I’ve found people are willing to work on industry prob-
lems,” he says. “They are not going to find anything different
than we do as far as trends. You can’t look at some of the devices
available today and say, ‘We are the only ones who can leverage
them.’ Everyone has the ability to leverage technology and if we
want to do it effectively we have to work together.”
The “secret sauce” for insurers is what they learn from the
data, not standardizing the data, explains Hartnett. The innova-
tion done on the Internet was based on standards and brought
tremendous improvements to the world and to insurance.

“Once you can describe the data coming from devices that can be consumable by everyone, people will come up with products where they can use the data,” says Hartnett. “That’s how they’ll innovate. Who can use it the most effectively and the best way to use that data is through some type of standardized form.”

Insurance Innovation Challenge

Hartnett was involved heavily in the Insurance Innovation Challenge for ACORD and he maintains it is going to be a key part of what the organization does in the future. As part of the 2020 initiative, he explains ACORD felt it could be a good platform for people to develop innovative ideas.

“Innovation is hard and it is characterized by failure,” he
says. “People don’t
expose themselves
to failure that way. If
ACORD has people
with great ideas and
no platform, and
ACORD can build
that platform, it can
be a great thing.”
Hartnett wrote
up a proposal for
ACORD last winter,
spoke to Maciag
about it, and ACORD
decided to pilot the
challenge. Hartnett
thought they would
get a few dozen
entrants, but by the
close of the submis-
sion period there were more than 100 entries.

“We were like the dog that caught the bus,” he jokes. “Now
what do we do?”
This summer, all the entrants competed in a semifinal round
and the top 12 advanced to the finals, which will be held at the
ACORD 2015 conference this month.

“It truly is a pitch competition,” he says. “It’s a tech crunch meets “Shark Tank” kind of environment. Our plan for next year is to expand it and have three semifinal rounds in the U.S. and one in London and at the ACORD 2016 event we’ll have a competition from each of those. Universally, the reaction from the people that participated—especially the ones that didn’t make the finals—was so positive and appreciative that someone provided the platform for them. Everyone that participated felt they gained something just from participating.” ITA

The “secret sauce” for insurers is what they learn from the data, not standardizing the data. The innovation done on the Internet was based on standards and brought tremendous improvements .