MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How to Avoid All-or-Nothing Thinking in Your Tech Strategy

Companies’ failure to innovate exposes them to risk and has a huge impact on the global economy.

When I bought my first house, my real estate agent needed me to go through the standard title insurance and escrow process in order to close the transaction. The process seemed strangely antiquated, based on an outdated model that required numerous, unnecessary steps. I looked into it and discovered that the handful of companies controlling the title insurance industry were still operating much like they did in the 1950s. They had managers overseeing teams of people who manually entered the same information into multiple computer programs in order to double-check data that had already been processed multiple times.

I asked why the title and escrow industry hadn’t embraced new technologies, from automation to machine learning to predictive analytics, given the rise of disruption in similar sectors. People in these companies told me this was simply how it’s done. But they also made an argument that they felt was enough to explain why new technologies should stay out of the sector: Because some cases require special care or involve unusual situations, people must be handling all processes in their entirety.