The Goliath strategy: How healthcare enterprises can compete with startup innovation – MedCity News

The digital revolution has forever shifted the balance of power in the world of business innovation. Large enterprises were once viewed as the most innovative companies in the world, but in recent decades, startups have developed a reputation for their ability to out-maneuver established companies. This is particularly true in terms of data-driven innovation, where easy access to sophisticated analytic solutions mean that the usual obstacles have never been easier to overcome.

Even in the healthcare market, where startups face significant barriers to entry, modern companies that start as side projects in garages, dorm rooms, and coffee shops are using data to build groundbreaking new technologies at incredible speeds. Despite having none of the advantages or resources of their enterprise competitors, healthcare startups are fast-forwarding their way to the top. It’s no surprise that tech industry leaders are inching into the healthcare space.

In most industries, and in healthcare in particular, innovation is fueled by a thriving analytic apps economy, a bustling marketplace in which companies develop proprietary technologies to extract actionable insights from the data they create. Today, we see numerous examples of how executives, business leaders, and Chief Data Officers are leading the way in generating new value and revenue for their customers with analytics products and services. Companies that aren’t taking advantage of this trend will be left behind.

Healthcare enterprises can win the analytics app economy
The biggest edge that startups have in terms of analytics innovation is their remarkable speed to market. Enterprises tend to build slow, complex processes around innovation, incubating it behind mature businesses and using the wrong metrics to assess its success. Once the enterprise is able to solve for those challenges, the startups lose their advantage, and the enterprise becomes much more capable of driving analytics innovation at scale.

Startups may have speed on their side, but they also face numerous obstacles of their own. Let’s explore the various challenges that startups deal with, and take a closer look at how established companies can gain a competitive advantage.

Recommendation: Enterprises should focus their initial analytics effort on their install base.

Recommendation: Leverage existing sales channels and make multiple bets at the same time.

Recommendation: Empower product leaders and work cross-P&L.

Recommendation: Centralize infrastructure decisions and empower businesses and functions to leverage it while focusing their energy on value creation via their domain expertise.

Recommendation: Establish an organization to manage the platform and your new innovation factory.

Recommendation: Consider partnering with existing customers and updating terms and conditions to acquire more data rights.

Think big. Start small. Start now.
Healthcare enterprises have all the ingredients to win in the analytic apps economy. They are much better equipped than startups to repeat and scale successes within their existing markets and even more equipped to enter new ones. Enterprise leaders who wish to embark upon a journey of data innovation should not try to predict the next 100 high-value questions around which they can build solutions. Instead, they should focus their efforts on establishing an organization and an infrastructure that will enable them to answer the next question fast. If you’re embarking on this journey, consider what types of new value you can create for your customers, your suppliers, and your end-users. Then deliver on that value and get a share of the outcome.

Final tip: Have fun on the journey. It’s been amazingly rewarding for my teams, customers, partners to unleash new value from existing assets. 

Unlike most pitching events, the INVEST Pitch Perfect competition on April 21-22, 2020 in Chicago spans health IT and life science sectors, including biopharma, diagnostics, and medical devices.