Horizon 3 Sick Care Innovation

While innovation is the new coin of the sick care realm, most of what is called innovation is incremental process improvement, tinkering, or worse, a solution looking for a problem.

McKinsey has described 3 horizons of growth or innovation. Horizon one represents those core businesses most readily identified with the company name and those that provide the greatest profits and cash flow. Here, the focus is on improving performance to maximize the remaining value. Horizon two encompasses emerging opportunities, including rising entrepreneurial ventures likely to generate substantial profits in the future but that could require considerable investment. Horizon three contains ideas for profitable growth down the road—for instance, small ventures such as research projects, pilot programs, or minority stakes in new businesses.

Sick care is stuck in horizon one and horizon two thinking. It is incremental; it focuses mostly on more effective and efficient care processes or attempts to expand product offerings or service line extensions using existing, well-known business models. Horizon 3 thinking attempts to make the existing business model obsolete by creating new ones. It represents those who want to go big or go home v. organizations that dedicate resources to the new, not exclusively to the now.

Here are some insights about Horizon 3 innovation and why BIG MEDICINE has a hard time bridging the now with the new.

Innovation has both a quantitative and qualitative component. Here are 10 things you should know about innovation.

Sick care is too sick to tinker with it. While there is value in thinking big and starting small, sick care needs intensive intervention, not periodic monitoring in the step-down unit administering analgesics to dull the pain.