STRATEGY & INNOVATION
STRATEGY & INNOVATION offers articles to stimulate thinking and accelerate action, allowing readers to untangle the organizational challenges that can stymie innovation and go behind the scenes to see the operational tactics that leading organizations use to get their hot new ideas to market.
Strategy & Innovation
Current Issue
Disrupting the Hospital Business Model
Hospitals can heal – if they focus on one business model and stop trying to be all things to all patients
Hospitals can heal – if they focus on one business model and stop trying to be all things to all patients
By Clayton M. Christensen, Jason Hwang, M.D., and Jerome H. Grossman, M.D.
In our current health care system, hospitals are tasked with the impossible job of doing everything well and keeping costs down at the same time. However, for a century hospitals have been on a relentless up-market march on the trajectory of sustaining innovation. An important lesson from our studies of disruptive innovation is that the hospitals providing much of today’s health care cannot and therefore ought not to be relied upon to transform the cost and accessibility of health care. Instead, hospitals need to be disrupted. We need them to cede market share to disruptive business models, patient by patient, disease by disease starting at the simplest end of the spectrum of disorders that they now serve.
Also in this Issue
- Innovators' Insights: How Do Disruptors Perform in Recessionary Times?
By Scott D. Anthony and Tim Huse
It’s natural to assume that one casualty of today’s tough economic climate will be up-and-coming disruptive companies that have had some early success but haven’t broken through to the mainstream. After all, consumers and companies snapping collective wallets shut will surely take the wind out of the "sales" of the up-and-comers. History suggests otherwise. We went back to look at how up-and-coming disruptors did in the face of the last three economic downturns in the U.S. In 1979, 11 such companies, including Intel, Home Depot, Nucor, and Southwest, fit our criteria. Their compound annual growth over the recession between 1979 and 1982 was 22 percent. Between 1989 and 1991, the sample of 11 up-and-coming disruptors, which included Best Buy, Cisco, and Charles Schwab, grew revenues by 33 percent. - Voices of Disruption: Interview with Ron Gonen, Co-Founder and CEO, RecycleBank
By Lillian Zhao and Tim Huse
Q. What is RecycleBank? A. RecycleBank helps municipalities dramatically increase recycling by rewarding households for the amount they recycle. We do that by providing every household with a recycling container. This container is embedded with a chip that is read by the mechanical arm retrofitted onto the city’s recycling truck. In short, households benefit because they are rewarded for recycling, municipalities benefit because they pay less to landfills, and our reward partners benefit because they get access to tremendous in-home advertising from us. - Emerging Technology Watch
New Turbine Design Could Make Wind Power Cheaper
From MIT's Technology Review: Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign Wind Turbine has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The company's design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. - From the InnoBlog
Innovating for Weight Loss? Focus on the Jobs
Could the fun of texting help kids to lose weight? Indirectly, perhaps, but not simply due to the technology or the act of texting itself. A recent study found that children between the ages of 5 and 13 who used text messaging to record food diaries were almost twice as likely to comply with the program than those who recorded their intake and activities using old-fashioned paper diaries.
Is Better Place's Approach to Electric Cars Really a Better Way?
Shai Aggasi, founder and chief executive of Better Place, spent a couple of hours last night telling his story before a crowd of several hundred at the Boston Museum of Science. I was lucky enough to attend and left admiring his vision and the work Better Place is doing, but also feeling skeptical about Better Place’s approach to answering the electric car question.
Economists: Innovation Opportunities Arising in Healthcare, Energy
Bob Solow (MIT) and Greg Mankiw (Harvard), two world-renowned economists who also hold opposing political philosophies, met to offer and discuss their perspectives on the most pressing economic topics the 44th president of the United States has to consider. Despite pronounced differences in their political views, Solow and Mankiw were aligned in two major points. First, they agreed that the grievous financial situation needs concerted action right now. Second, both agreed that healthcare and energy demand dedicated attention, since they directly affect the U.S. social safety net and national security. These two sectors also show enormous potential for growth.
Cookies - Satisfying Emotional Jobs for Generations
I love cookies and there is no time of year more cookie-centric than the holidays. I have many fond memories of baking cookies with my mom, gleefully squishing Hershey’s kisses into the center of peanut-butter cookies and carefully painting icing on sugar cookies. This is why I was so fascinated by Arrowhead Mills’ “Bake with Me,” a line of baking mixes designed to encourage interaction between children and their caregivers. All baking companies target functional jobs around taste, attractiveness of the food, nutritional value, and preparation time required. Arrowhead Mills has nailed the emotional jobs of parents.