Recently in Innovation Category

In a July 27 feature, Business Week, published a profile of Honda's new CEO, Takanobu Ito. The spin in Honda's New CEO Is Also Chief Innovator by Reena Jana and Ian Rowley is an examination of the value and wisdom of appointing an "in the trenches" engineer (Ito is also Honda's Director of Research and Development) to the chief executive post, thereby combining the company's leadership accountability for innovation and business success. It struck me that health care organizations face similar questions when considering whether or not to place clinicians in top executive management positions. So read the article and think about the issues it raises...

In health care, possibly more than other industries, we consider ourselves so expert that innovation is generally expected to come from within - and deep within at that. Can We Innovate Ourselves Out of Recession published July 1, 2009 in the Knowledge@Wharton column on Forbes. Com examines a different approach taken by industry. It describes the effective use of external innovation networks to generate solutions to technical problems in the non health care world. It occurred to me that health care leaders might want to consider how to harness fresh ideas from smart people outside our somewhat insular industry...

A few months ago, this blog commented on a short piece about the use of ethnography as a strategic tool (Try Ethnography for Health Care Strategy). The source article had been a short, theoretical, and perhaps even whimsical exploration of the use of anthropologists in developing business strategy. Well, along comes Business Week on June 24 with "How to Kick off an Innovation Project" by Jessie Scanlon which gets practical really fast in describing how Office Max used ethnography to do an image turnaround - complete with a "how to" guide. It struck me then, and now, that there are valuable pearls for health care leaders here...

On April 27, The Economist (web version) published a brief piece titled Entrepreneurship in its regular "Idea" column in which it briefly defines and characterizes entrepreneurship - well done, but no biggie. More interesting was a reminder that one aspect of entrepreneurship is "intrapraneurship" - defined as "the introduction and implementation of a significant innovation for the firm by one or more employees working within an established organisation". I thought it was timely for health care and physician leaders to examine this a bit further so I surfed around, connected a few dots from my own consulting experience, and learned a few things worth sharing here...

Don't Wait to Innovate by Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen of Jump Associates is a short column about improvements at a disability claims processor that appeared in the online edition of Business Week on April 27. It was touted as an example of the potential power of innovation for enhancing performance in an already successful business. How could this be relevant to real health care? Well, I saw it completely differently. It was really all about how injecting humanity into a business resulted in decreasing resource use and liability - thereby enhancing customer satisfaction, decreasing costs, and increasing profitability. Sound like outcomes we could use in health care? Read on...

When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company by Morten T. Hansen, appeared in the April 2009 Harvard Business Review and Getting Togetherness was published online on Economist.com on April 7. Both examine collaboration within organizations. The interesting news from Professor Hansen (U.C. Berkeley and Insead) is that despite the charge for internal collaboration across industries, it is not a "no brainer" in terms of benefit. So by extension, it may not be the best tool for health care leaders in all circumstances...

R&D Spending Holds Steady in Slump, appearing in the April 6 Wall Street Journal, chronicles the benefits of continued corporate investment in research and development during down economic cycles. In this page one article, authors Justin Scheck and Paul Glader observe that: "Big R&D spenders say they've learned from past downturns that they must invest through tough times if they hope to compete when the economy improves." This may hold a lesson for health care leaders.

Mssrs. Scheck and Glader report on the difference between companies that maintained R&D spending in poor economic times and harvested substantial returns from new products and technologies (Apple's investement between 1999 and 2002 resulted in the launch of its iPOD) and those that cut back in those periods and subsequently lost market share or competitive edge (General Electric and Motorola in the same period). I suspect these lessons, and others from the corporate experience that are cited by the authors, likely apply to health care products and devices as well. We just don't usually think of health care providers and payors as major investors in R&D. Think again. We do invest, albeit differently. Our investments in new medical technology, infrastructure, personnel, and training may not be research but they certainly qualify as product development and innovation in the programs and services that are the core of our businesses.

So the lesson for health care leaders is that when under pressure to cut "unnecessary cost," continued improvement of quality, safety, IT, and customer service - investments crucial to our reputation and therefore our revenue base - should be last rather than first on the cutting block. Perhaps it even makes sense to increase these investments in pursuit of competitive advantage at a time when others are reticent to invest.

Left untended and stagnant in a shifting and highly competitive environment, health care delivery organizations are at risk of losing advantage. And as an industry that must regularly adopt new scientific and technologic innovations, we must continually reinvent our ability, our systems, and our people to receive and effectively implement the fruits of innovation efforts in other health related industries. Which qualifies us as investors in R&D in my book.

Everyone's abuzz about the Tata Nano. The world's cheapest car is taking India, and the world, by storm. Leveraging the wundercar's impending launch, Business Week (on March 18, 2009) asked the critical question in its eponymous article: What Can Tata's Nano Teach Detroit? I immediately tried to leverage their question to your advantage - so I began to wonder about what the Nano can teach health care leaders...

I've previously commented on Thomas D. Kuczmarski's innovative ideas about innovation (see Is Don Berwick the Secretary of Innovation?). I am going back to the well because An Innovation Action Plan for Obama which appeared in his March 9 Business Week web site column seemed worthy of translation from the business world to the world of health care leadership...

Executives Have No Idea What Customers Want, by Andrea J. Ayers, President of Customer Management for Convergys - a company that specializes in customer relationship management - appeared on Forbes.com on March 10. It's a bold assertion based on a sobering survey conducted by Convergys across 10 industries revealing that: "Nearly half of consumers (47%) say they don't believe company executives understand their experiences...More than one-third (41%) of the customers who take the time to complain don't think companies listen to or act on their feedback.... [of these] more than half will defect--leaving a company flatly--based on bad customer experiences, without ever telling the company why." Overall, she claims that: "17% of [all customer] interactions result in a customer leaving the company..." Is health care an exception. I doubt it. This is something health care leaders could do something about...