Skip to main content

Align Your Foresight With Venture Capital

Health care strategists interested in an early peek at where their industry may be heading should monitor trends in venture capital funding. Those start-up and early phase companies are the future of health care technology, pharma, informatics and treatment modalities.

Your skills at predicting which ideas will make it big don't have to be perfect. But train yourself to ask lots of scenario-type questions: What if this idea becomes mainstream? What is our organization doing - and relying upon - that might be replaced or made obsolete? What would be the impact on us if that happened? How do we mitigate that impact? Are there new skills and/or knowledge that we must gain to take advantage of the idea?

Get a team together and facilitate a discussion. Develop a range of scenarios and possible responses, not because you're trying to be precisely right, but because shared insights and understanding improve your response - no matter which scenario ultimately proves correct.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Simplicity From Complexity

Health care planners typically juggle many different services and businesses, each with unique customers, competitors and prospects.  The complexity can be overwhelming.  So-called portfolio models for assessing industry attractiveness and competitive strength can be a good analytical jumping-off point, including the McKinsey-GE 9-box matrix . (Click on the "Launch Interactive" link.)
Post a Comment
Read more

5 Marketing Megatrends

Coming to a brand near you, from Adam Kleinberg at iMedia Connection, here are " 5 marketing megatrends you can't ignore ." Mass collaboration... Constant connectivity... Globalization... Pervasive distrust in big corporations... A global sense of urgency... #4 is, I think, under-appreciated in health care. Doctors and hospitals like to think of themselves as the last of the white hat-wearing good guys, and maybe they are. But trust is a funny thing - built over decades and lost overnight. Screw it up and watch the laser beam of populist rage move from Wall Street to Medical Avenue.
Post a Comment
Read more