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Data / Empowering High Performance

Porter Research

Innovate. Execute. Get Results.

Cynthia Porter, President
August 4, 2010

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Three words seem to be on the tips of the tongues of C-level executives, marketing folks, product managers and sales teams - Innovate. Execute. Results.

They all tie together, but innovation is the key - be innovative, embrace innovation, understand that it's needed to succeed. Consider the innovation and growth of Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware and contrast their results with Nortel and MTI.

Innovation may appear to be a buzzword, but what does it really mean? According to Wikipedia, innovation may refer to incremental, emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes or organizations. According to Roy Luebke, an innovation consultant focused on discovering new, customer-driven opportunity areas to help define the future of a company, innovation is "anything new that creates economic value. The key is that it must be implemented and create value. Innovation focus must align with overall business strategy and vision. There are relative amounts of innovation including incremental, breakthrough, disruptive, etc. What IS important is what the organization needs relative to its position and growth needs in its chosen markets." 

Embrace Innovation
The healthcare industry needs to embrace this concept to achieve that "wow" factor.

"The 'wow' is that change and evolution is just part of business," says Luebke, who has worked with WebMD, Mysis and Optio. "Change is inevitable and needs to be understood and embraced, not feared. Business leaders need to create a new set of processes to harness changes, identify opportunity areas for growth, experiment with new concepts, and turn their new concepts into profit."

Perhaps one of the greatest opportunities for applying innovation is in the area of interoperability. Software and hardware vendors can use the principles behind innovation to help healthcare executives reach their goals for EMR adoption and implementation, and to achieve process improvement.

A clear example of this can be found with providers looking to not only adopt EMRs, but to take implementation further in the name of interoperability. Robert Diamond, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of healthcare system Health Quest, recently faced this problem when deciding how to move forward with EMR deployment. His system's previous IT infrastructure simply couldn't keep up with the dramatic growth of data generated by the healthcare system's GE Healthcare Centricity PACS-IW imaging systems. In the last 18 months, its storage area network grew more than eight-fold, resulting in longer backup windows and the potential for more frequent backup failures.

So Diamond looked beyond traditional EMR vendors to work with innovative companies that could first solve this interoperability issue. Health Quest optimized its information infrastructure, deployed virtualization, advanced disk-based backup and recovery solutions, and new high-end applications from a combination of vendors all under the EMC umbrella. This was much more difficult than simply deciding on what EMR to purchase in order to meet Meaningful Use requirements.

Understand Innovation
Porter Research has worked with many innovative healthcare IT companies that are tackling some of the toughest IT issues, and helping them test concepts in the market as they rapidly move to deploy new technology, solutions and services. For example, speech and imaging solutions provider Nuance was looking for innovative ways to ensure that doctors had no trouble adopting its speech recognition technologies. Porter Research reached out to physicians already using speech recognition to find out how Nuance could encourage their peers to adopt the technology as well. Nuance is now using these new adoptability ideas, and beginning to see immediate growth.

Implement Innovation
With the rush to meet Meaningful Use objectives, the healthcare IT industry can't afford to make wrong decisions. It is important to remember that innovation is not a single BIG idea but rather little flashes of insight that, over the long term, will ultimately lead to greater success.

Luebke says that the biggest thing holding people back from innovation is fear. "Fear is just unknown risk in economic terms. Fear can be eliminated by experimenting in small, controlled ways. Fear can also be eliminated by more thorough research into technology, market drivers and, ultimately, patient needs. 

"The first step in the process of innovation is to know the customer more deeply than ever before. Tie growth plans to meet customer needs. Define customers not just by patients, but by who else contributes to the patient’s welfare.  

"Innovation is also more than just products. It is also financial innovation (i.e. business models) partnerships and alliances, processes, services, brand, channel and user experience. Each of these areas of innovation requires deeper discussion, but the point is to expand one’s view of what innovation entails. 

"As a process, what people need to look at is creating a systemic and proactive approach to framing problems effectively, researching customers, analyzing the resulting insights, creating new concepts, experimenting and testing, then realizing innovation by taking new ideas to market."

It's critical that senior leaders demonstrate a commitment to innovation from the top down, empower people to be creative, and provide incentives to solve problems and bring solutions to the market. It’s imperative to make sure the organization is able to execute and achieve results that are in line with the company’s overall goals, whether that be increased profitability, greater exposure in the market, or new product development.







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