Blueprint 2026

Six conditions decide how fast you turn a problem into a product.

The fourth Blueprint. Four years and more than a hundred capability assessments on, carriers rarely ask us what an innovation capability is built from — they ask why theirs isn't working. This edition answers that with the Six Cs: capital, capacity, capabilities, concepts, controls and culture. Every carrier already has all six. The one furthest from where your ambition needs it is the one setting your speed.

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Inside the report

The Six Cs, and how to find your constraint.

It starts with why innovation models fail: the rollercoaster of two-to-three-year cycles that each cost $2-10m and end in collapse, and the ladder that carriers on a working model climb instead.

Then the six conditions and the forty-two mechanisms beneath them, how to sequence the work, five common ways of getting that wrong, and the questions worth asking yourself before you build anything. With case studies from Dai-ichi Life, Travelers, Aviva, AXA, AXA Next, Generali and Zurich.

Insurance Innovation Blueprint 2026 report cover

The framework

Six conditions. The weakest one sets your speed.

Not stages, and not a menu. Every carrier has all six at some level, whether anyone designed them or not. The question is never whether you have one — it's how strong it is, and whether it's the thing holding you back.

Capital

The funding available, and how easily you can get at it. A budget you can't reach quickly is a smaller capability than a modest fund you can.

Capacity

The people and time to develop, test and scale ideas — including specialist hours from well outside the innovation function. Not about job titles.

Capabilities

The skills, methods and tools that let people progress an idea competently rather than by instinct. Not whether they have time, but whether they know how.

Concepts

The opportunities being explored, and whether they're strategically relevant, well framed and rooted in real insight. A pipeline of two hundred ideas can be an empty pipeline.

Controls

The governance, decision rights and metrics that keep innovation purposeful without choking it. Red tape is what you get when controls are designed for the wrong risk.

Culture

The environment and behaviours that decide whether any of the above survives contact with the organisation. Culture is what persists when nobody is watching.

Why trust us?

Built from the work, not the sidelines.

This isn't desk research. Blueprint 2026 draws on three sources: the 250-carrier study behind the last edition, formal capability assessments of more than a hundred carriers since, and the innovation models we've designed and built inside real carriers and then watched run.

Almost everything that changed in this edition changed because a model that looked right on paper behaved differently in practice.

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Diagnosis before building.

The most expensive mistake is spending well on the wrong condition, and the condition holding you back is rarely the one the organisation talks about.

Our Innovation HealthCheck works through all six conditions and the forty-two mechanisms beneath them, benchmarked against inputs from more than a hundred carriers. It produces a shape rather than a grade: the widest gap between where you are and where your ambition needs you to be, and the cheapest credible way to close it.

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