We all know the curve of the product sales cycle. Seen below is what just about every business management and economics book on the shelf expresses what Geoffrey Moore illustrates in his book, Inside the Tornado.

 
This model illustrates the system after the innovators have already figured out on their own how to create the product or service, how to finance its getting to the market, and how they depended on early adopters to virally sell the benefits of the product/service. Moore continues with a discussion of the Chasm and how to get the early followers & majority to escalate the profitably sales. The late majority and laggards illustrate market saturation resulting in cash cows, marginal earnings, or the ultimate end of the product or service in the market.

The problem with this illustration, as with nearly all business management books and especially healthcare administration text, is that they don’t teach the existing company how to innovate. It is a well known fact that most healthcare organizations and the industry as a whole is 10 years behind the general business community in adopting proven management techniques to be successful “beside themselves.”

Healthcare organizations have never been innovative entities with the ability to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving healthcare environment and restrictive financial issues. With consumerism escalating in healthcare, patient safety concerns, executive fiduciary responsibility concerns, general competitiveness, employee satisfaction, suppliers/venders requirements as partners, payor & employer pressures, and the push for the adoption of health informatics every healthcare organization needs to learn how to be innovative.

The dynamics of these issues include constant change, evolving cultures, complex communication, knowledge & intellectual property rights, complex processes, and the ever illusive continuous quality improvement.

The place we must begin is at the beginning of creating ideas. We must develop a facilitating environment with incentives that encourages everyone in the organization to think how to better do their job, assist their team mate to better do their job, and the serve the customer better than our competitor.

We don’t really have to change much. We can continue to build on our traditional values of leadership that focus on effective communication, integrity, discipline and execution. Through these values, we can inspire an organizational culture of innovators collaborating to take advantage of today’s climate of change utilizing the Staging Innovation in Healthcare process.

As illustrated above, we follow seven stages that include:

Exploration
Creating a culture of open minds motivated to continuously think and identify problems or opportunities for improvement.

Discovery
A process to generate, grow and qualify new innovations to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities identified.

Modeling
To create models of the innovation and build the business case defining the innovation’s value.

Validation

Researching in Alpha and Beta environments in order to validate the business case.

Development

Project planning for the implementation and operation of the innovation.

Promotion
Communicating the value of the innovation, the implementation process, and how it will benefit each stakeholder all to gain acceptance and participation for its success.

Launch
Execute and make operational, begin commercialization programs, distribute the product through sales channels, and monitor the market for requirements of upgrades and enhancements.

Together the life cycle of a service or product, from idea generation to discontinuance is illustrated below.

What the Staging process allows us to do, is create within our healthcare organization a culture of continuously looking for ideas that will not only help make our operation better, but something that we can also take to the market to benefit others and create a new revenue sources. Ultimate we create a machine turning out innovations regularly, creating new revenue for the organization that is replacing those that are discontinued or low margin.