Disruptive innovations don't have to rule the market, they just have to change the market and force others to follow suit. The goal of disruptive companies is to challenge the conventional market and create a new one.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. GB Shaw
Showing posts with label Disruptive Innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Disruptive Innovation. Show all posts
Monday, October 10, 2011
Disruptive Innovation
From one of my fave blogs, The Big Picture, comes a great graphic about disruptive innovation. Bottom line;
Friday, April 1, 2011
Angry Bird Medicine
A wonderful title to a great blog entry on the BMJ blogs site. Talking about reducing medicine to an App that can be downloaded to ones phone. He has a fantastic quote, “6 years of medical school and 10 years of training can now be put onto an App and sold for a few dollars – where did I go wrong?”
I dont think a 99 cent app on your phone is going to take the place of a doctor just yet, but the natural progression is that knowledge becomes a commodity, it moves down the value chain, and it no longer becomes cost effective for a particular expert to broker that knowledge. So for example, there is no reason why someone with hypertension cant be monitored at home, blood pressure readings relayed by phone to a central station and feedback given around diet, medications etc, all without the person ever leaving home.
I dont think a 99 cent app on your phone is going to take the place of a doctor just yet, but the natural progression is that knowledge becomes a commodity, it moves down the value chain, and it no longer becomes cost effective for a particular expert to broker that knowledge. So for example, there is no reason why someone with hypertension cant be monitored at home, blood pressure readings relayed by phone to a central station and feedback given around diet, medications etc, all without the person ever leaving home.
Disruptive Innovation & healthcare education
One of the great difficulties in bringing safety and quality to the fore in healthcare is that although it impacts everyone, no specialty sees it as their responsibility to take the lead, itself a damning sign of the inability of the profession to see the critical merits of teamwork and systems thinking. The IHI set up its Open School some years ago in an attempt to bring this knowledge directly to healthcare students. My impression is that it is certainly proving successful, but it is the nature of such developments to take many years to fully bear fruit. But bear fruit it will. The message is too compelling and students will naturally ask why they are not being exposed to this area by their own teachers. It's all part of a bottom up approach to change. As an example, I suggest you check out this video, part of the course materials for the Open School.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Healthcare; time to be disrupted.
A disruptive innovation (the term was first coined by Clay Christensen) is a technology or strategy, which disrupts an existing market by radically lowering price, increasing productivity or by gaining an alternative set of customers. Examples include the transition from sail to steamships, the adoption of personal computers in place of mainframes and so on. Henry Ford put it well; “to build a better motorcar one could either develop a faster and stronger horse or do something completely different.”
The question for healthcare is whether disruptive innovations are required to radically improve value and outcomes? Alternatively can tinkering with the system, (QIPP, ACO, Medical Homes, pay for performance, increase measurement and accountability) drive sufficient performance and improvement. To truly understand the significance of this question, one has to understand both the power of disruptive innovation and the failure of those agencies being disrupted to challenge the disruption.
Disruptive innovations essentially create a market for a product or service that the incumbents fail to recognize. They do so, often by offering a cheaper, slimmed down product; think Ryanair. One may not like them but they not only offer a cheaper reliable service, but developed a market for services that no-one could have imagined, (London Lodz anyone?).
Existing airlines had no incentive to develop such innovations; they were happy with their quasi-monopolies. Ryanair had to develop such markets in order to grow. if existing companies were to chase these market opportunities, they would cut into their existing markets and reduce their profit margins. In a sense they are helpless to do anything, apart from resisting and fighting back, (think lobbyists, negative advertising campaigns)
Jump to healthcare, the structures are identical. Seemingly strong vested interests, institutional, professional, academic, who will do their best to fight any interloper promising a better cheaper service. And they are helped immensely by the emotional arguments that if the service they offer is undercut, people will die.
Are there examples of such disruption in health? They are likely to appear when the current model no longer makes financial sense, or where Western models are not applicable. It is likely that if this economic downturn persists that we will begin to see disruptors emerge in both the West, and emerge from the developing world into the West. For example, “Aravind the world’s biggest eye-hospital chain, performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly-line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place.” (Economist April 2010)
A paper by Robert Brook of the RAND corporation outlined one vision of potential disruptors. These include:
The question for healthcare is whether disruptive innovations are required to radically improve value and outcomes? Alternatively can tinkering with the system, (QIPP, ACO, Medical Homes, pay for performance, increase measurement and accountability) drive sufficient performance and improvement. To truly understand the significance of this question, one has to understand both the power of disruptive innovation and the failure of those agencies being disrupted to challenge the disruption.
Disruptive innovations essentially create a market for a product or service that the incumbents fail to recognize. They do so, often by offering a cheaper, slimmed down product; think Ryanair. One may not like them but they not only offer a cheaper reliable service, but developed a market for services that no-one could have imagined, (London Lodz anyone?).
Existing airlines had no incentive to develop such innovations; they were happy with their quasi-monopolies. Ryanair had to develop such markets in order to grow. if existing companies were to chase these market opportunities, they would cut into their existing markets and reduce their profit margins. In a sense they are helpless to do anything, apart from resisting and fighting back, (think lobbyists, negative advertising campaigns)
Jump to healthcare, the structures are identical. Seemingly strong vested interests, institutional, professional, academic, who will do their best to fight any interloper promising a better cheaper service. And they are helped immensely by the emotional arguments that if the service they offer is undercut, people will die.
Are there examples of such disruption in health? They are likely to appear when the current model no longer makes financial sense, or where Western models are not applicable. It is likely that if this economic downturn persists that we will begin to see disruptors emerge in both the West, and emerge from the developing world into the West. For example, “Aravind the world’s biggest eye-hospital chain, performs some 200,000 eye operations a year. It takes the assembly-line principle literally: four operating tables are laid side by side and two doctors operate on adjacent tables. When the first operation is done, the second patient is already in place.” (Economist April 2010)
A paper by Robert Brook of the RAND corporation outlined one vision of potential disruptors. These include:
- Considering the entire cost of care, to include not just the cost to the individual but the energy cost, (carbon cost)
- Unifying the two great silos of medicine and education so that educators play a central role in improving children’s health and healthcare providers are judged partly on their success at improving educational attainment in their patients
- A shift to non-physican care, e.g. nurse practitioners
- Reduce the training required for repetitive technical task; for example why go to medical school, residency and fellowship to train how to remove cataracts. Pretty radical.
- Routine healthcare delivered 24/7. So no more 9-5 operating rooms or clinics.
- Outsourcing or off-shoring of many tasks, including diagnostics, elective surgery which is already happening.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Disruptive Innovation
Hope to write a bit today about disruptive innovation in healthcare. Just to get into the mood. Thanks Lils.
From Apple Computers Think Different (R) campaign.
"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
From Apple Computers Think Different (R) campaign.
"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
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