Beyond conflict and change: a call for innovation on healthcare
Only the ones who will lift to new levels of collaboration and partnerships, will win the digital dare.
Innovation has become vital for Life Science, Healthcare and Insurance organizations who have never been in the forefront in adopting new technologies and transforming their way of operating.
The fact is that their creativity has faded in favor of a strengthening control.
For several decades, IP exclusivity and regulatory laws have been key in pursuing and financing innovation, granting prosperity and growth to organizations.
Confident in these unpassable barriers, their innovation processes have become so heavy to impairing their reaction when new start-ups, Tech Giants, or other large organizations have started to bite around pieces of businesses, conquering roles and evolving and converging their ecosystems. This got even worst during pandemic.
While major insurers have reacted with their own Innovation Labs and Hackathons, Insure-techs raise millions USD in venture capital funding, offering solutions to settle billions in claims. An example? Tractable, an AI startup founded in 2014 that has created an A.I. algorithm producing a near-instantaneous damage estimate via a phone apps to take and upload photos of the accident; Admiral Seguros, the Spanish subsidiary of Admiral, is now pioneering the use of of this technology in Europe.
Life-Science organizations have kept celebrating innovation awards and building innovation parks full of large and small players eager to get a slice of the digital pie, although their creative sparks is fading away with their key domain knowledge and biotech orgs like Moderna, not only mount the podium of the most important discovery of the last 80 years, but gives an ethical lesson to the whole world by not enforcing patents for the COVID-19 vaccine.
So far the contribution of Pharma orgs and insurers to the evolution of healthcare toward client centric, preventive wellcare ecosystem has been minimal as they have become too slow in pursuing innovation. Yes, they can leaf through patents and awards, but the truth is that, heavy regulations, gigantic size, and finance driven objectives have degraded domain knowledge to the extend of lowering their decennial barriers with new agile high tech actors entering their space. This threat has increased their defenses and pushed for non organic acquisition of knowledge (pharma) or markets (insurances).
The fact is that the promotion of the wellcare ecosystem is their last, great opportunity to remove the soot from their processes: they are starting to feel the urge of change.
To win their digital dare they will need to fly high, scouring the industry for opportunities they are becoming reality day after day. They will have to abandon burrowing their own way into regulations and push the entire sector to new levels of collaboration.
It is not going to be an easy transition.
My other articles on Innovation
Three forces that shape innovation beyond conflict and change
The three essential traits of successful innovators
My other articles on Wellcare
The birth of “Wellcare”: a long term digital strategy for Pharma and Insurance organizations
Wellcare is shaping around online pharmacy competition: this is how!