Strategy: Clayton Christensen ... The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis

2010-03-09T11:40:23.901Z

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Don’t believe everything you learn in business school, cautions Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. “It’s the principles of good management we teach that cause successful companies to fail.” In this meaty lecture, Christensen distills several books’ worth of research describing how business leaders sometimes metamorphose into losers when confronted with market-rocking innovations. He also reveals how we may harness his insights in such socially significant and complex industries as health care.

Christensen distinguishes between the kind of sustained and incremental technological improvements that help a market leader retain its edge, and “disruptive technology,” where a simple and affordable idea takes root in “an undemanding application at the bottom of the market, then improves from that foothold.” Christensen, looking at lots of industries “found almost invariably that an entrant company came in and killed the leaders” by way of a simplifying technology. He offers a case study of apparently marginal mini-steel mills that over a few decades toppled big U.S. steel mills. As the little guys pursued the lowest profit segment of the steel market with their more efficient, lower-cost methods, the big mills fled to where they imagined higher profits lay. Says Christensen, “You’re a little boy and want to win a fight against the giant. The best way to win is to pick a fight where the giant is motivated to flee rather than to fight.”

This has happened in the computer industry (mainframes to PCs), and with autos (Ford to Toyota). Department stores yielded to Walmarts, and JP Morgan to Fidelity, says Christensen. In each case, three enablers come into play: the transformation of a basic technology problem in the industry into “something that’s foolproof and idiot simple;” and the embedding of that solution into a cost-effective business model, which itself falls within a “complete vertical commercial system.”

Christensen spies symptoms of such disruptions bubbling up in the health care industry, such as molecular diagnostics, imaging technologies and high bandwidth telecom, and business model innovations. Integrated health systems like Kaiser Permanente have a leg up in deploying and optimizing these disruptive technologies.

The push for widespread health care reform must come from employers, who in spite of their declared intent to cut health care costs also know “they profit when their employees are healthy and productive.” Affordable health care, he concludes, “doesn’t come by expecting high end, expensive institutions or expensive caregivers to become cheap, but by bringing technology to lower cost providers and venues of care, so they can become more capable.”

Strategy: Ford's CEO on social media and innovation

2009-01-14T20:20:15.025Z

At the Ultimate Bloggers Dinner on the opening night of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last Wednesday, Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor Company, took out time to sit down with a few bloggers for a live Webcast, a couple of cell phone interviews, and the interview above, captured with a Canon HV20 hi-def camcorder.

Chris Heuer of AdHocnium (and the Social Media Club) interviewed Mulally about how Ford is using social media to drive innovation and transformation inside the company. The interviewers found Mulally to be incredibly personable and knowledgeable about the social forces swirling through the economy.

The video is 10 minutes long and a bit noisy, but you can hear Mulally throughout.

See more at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/

Future Vision: Web 10.0 - Wired's Kevin Kelly on the Next 6,500 Days of the Internet (November 2008)

2008-11-12T13:08:18.473Z

A little over 6,500 days have passed since Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page. Wired’s Kevin Kelly takes a shot at predicting what the next 6,500 will bring. He offers numerous insights in the 15-minute talk, but the first and final of these is, “believe the impossible.”

All Videos Tagged Strategy (MedTech I.Q.) - MedTech I.Q.

Strategy: Clayton Christensen ... The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis

Strategy: Ford's CEO on social media and innovation

Future Vision: Web 10.0 - Wired's Kevin Kelly on the Next 6,500 Days of the Internet (November 2008)