Image reproduced with permission from the artist Flavia Birsan.
When over 20 years ago, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen launched for the first time the concept of Disruptive Innovation, he was referring to “a process whereby a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors”.
Since then, Disruptive innovation became one of the most popular but also one of the most misused terms of the current business vocabulary, because not every emerging, new and spectacular technology has the potential to change the business or social landscape, disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange the value pools.
In order to be genuinely ‘Disruptive’, the new technology should meet three conditions:
- Enabling Technology – an invention or innovation that makes a product or service more affordable and accessible, to a wider population;
- Innovative Business Model – targeting new costumers, who previously did not have access to products or services or low-end consumers;
- Coherent Value Network – a network in which all the involved parties are doing better/getting more value when the disruptive technology prospers.
In line with these principles, in 2008, Prof. Christensen, together with Dr. Jerome Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang launched The Innovator’s Prescription - a comprehensive analysis of the strategies meant to improve healthcare and make it affordable: precision medicine that reduces costs, taking new steps to personalize care, disruptive business models to improve quality, accessibility, and affordability by changing the way hospitals and doctors work, patient networks enabling a more effective treatment of chronic diseases, insurance and regulatory reforms to stimulate disruption in health care.
Nowadays, we are experiencing an avalanche of new and breakthrough bioengineering technologies, various gene therapies, regenerative medicine, bionic organs, new drugs and medical devices and so on. However, they are not disruptive by default, especially when coming together with sky-rising costs. Making innovation truly disruptive, in a world with rising healthcare needs, can be a bigger challenge that the innovation process itself.
The strategic choice between a classical path – premium prices just for being new and access for a limited number of patients - or a disruptive one, which can really improve accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare services, may mean:
- redefining value and finding new ways of measuring it from all the involved stakeholders perspectives - healthcare providers, payers, manufacturers, patients and society;
- implementing new principles of providing healthcare – care anywhere, care networking, care customization;
- adaptive pathways for drugs and medical device registration and setting new ways of monitoring the health outcomes and real-world data generation;
- changing the paradigm from patient centred care to patient as a healthcare team member;
- ways to determine business and policy makers understanding of which technologies will really matter and prepare accordingly.
In this Research Topic, the authors welcome Original Research, Perspective and Policy papers, proposing the new ways of measuring health outcomes and defining value, based on studying emerging challenges and opportunities presented by disruptive technologies, from the perspective of a variety of stakeholders such as healthcare providers, payers, manufacturers, patients and society.
Image reproduced with permission from the artist Flavia Birsan.
When over 20 years ago, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen launched for the first time the concept of Disruptive Innovation, he was referring to “a process whereby a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors”.
Since then, Disruptive innovation became one of the most popular but also one of the most misused terms of the current business vocabulary, because not every emerging, new and spectacular technology has the potential to change the business or social landscape, disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange the value pools.
In order to be genuinely ‘Disruptive’, the new technology should meet three conditions:
- Enabling Technology – an invention or innovation that makes a product or service more affordable and accessible, to a wider population;
- Innovative Business Model – targeting new costumers, who previously did not have access to products or services or low-end consumers;
- Coherent Value Network – a network in which all the involved parties are doing better/getting more value when the disruptive technology prospers.
In line with these principles, in 2008, Prof. Christensen, together with Dr. Jerome Grossman and Dr. Jason Hwang launched The Innovator’s Prescription - a comprehensive analysis of the strategies meant to improve healthcare and make it affordable: precision medicine that reduces costs, taking new steps to personalize care, disruptive business models to improve quality, accessibility, and affordability by changing the way hospitals and doctors work, patient networks enabling a more effective treatment of chronic diseases, insurance and regulatory reforms to stimulate disruption in health care.
Nowadays, we are experiencing an avalanche of new and breakthrough bioengineering technologies, various gene therapies, regenerative medicine, bionic organs, new drugs and medical devices and so on. However, they are not disruptive by default, especially when coming together with sky-rising costs. Making innovation truly disruptive, in a world with rising healthcare needs, can be a bigger challenge that the innovation process itself.
The strategic choice between a classical path – premium prices just for being new and access for a limited number of patients - or a disruptive one, which can really improve accessibility, affordability and quality of healthcare services, may mean:
- redefining value and finding new ways of measuring it from all the involved stakeholders perspectives - healthcare providers, payers, manufacturers, patients and society;
- implementing new principles of providing healthcare – care anywhere, care networking, care customization;
- adaptive pathways for drugs and medical device registration and setting new ways of monitoring the health outcomes and real-world data generation;
- changing the paradigm from patient centred care to patient as a healthcare team member;
- ways to determine business and policy makers understanding of which technologies will really matter and prepare accordingly.
In this Research Topic, the authors welcome Original Research, Perspective and Policy papers, proposing the new ways of measuring health outcomes and defining value, based on studying emerging challenges and opportunities presented by disruptive technologies, from the perspective of a variety of stakeholders such as healthcare providers, payers, manufacturers, patients and society.
