Happy New Year!
As an industry, we made huge progress in 2017 on our much-needed transformation, and 2018 is looking like it may be the tipping point. I think we will be in a very different place at the end of this calendar year. Even though we won't be able to act on all of the immense opportunities in front of us this year, we'll tackle a bunch, and the path to the future will be far clearer than it is now.
I can't wait.
To help set the stage, I've gone back through the nearly 1,000 articles we published from thought leaders in 2017 and have highlighted the six most-read articles below. Many are predictions about what would happen during the year. They hold up remarkably well and provide a start for a road map for 2018, because the opportunities that are identified take much more than a single calendar year to play out.
My favorite is the final one, from our own Guy Fraker, on how to start on an innovation program. That first step is a doozy. Addressing a classic problem for incumbents, Guy provides a powerful framework for how to not only think outside the box but for how to drive that thinking into products and services that increase profits and generate growth in ways that can transform a business and, in time, the industry. Despite all our progress, we risk kidding ourselves about how far we still have to go—the spate of "innovation tourism" in Silicon Valley worries me—and Guy provides a no-nonsense approach that not only mattered in 2017 but that will hold up for years to come.
Top 10 Insurtech Trends for '17
Issues to Watch in Work Comp
Why AI Will Transform
The New Age of Aggregators
3 Areas of Opportunity
Innovation: Where Do We Start?
Stay tuned: Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be publishing a series of articles on our website that will set the agenda for 2018.
Onward and upward!
Paul Carroll,
Editor in Chief
