If one takes a long view of the history of technological innovation in business, a pattern can be perceived:
- An innovation emerges
- A cohort of early adopters perceive its superiority to existing solutions, identify the benefits it can bring to their business, and begin to evangelise
- Resistance is encountered from users of the incumbent dominant technologies, assisted by those who have a vested interest in its continuation such as vendors, developers, and service providers who have built business propositions around the existing solutions
- A break point is reached: the technology either continues to attract adopters organically until it becomes a dominant solution, or else it falters and becomes a residual technology, dwindling to the point where it is used only by ideologically committed devotees and hobbyists
The majority are now users of the dominant solution, with all its benefits, and all its flaws.
However, the restless early adopter cohort will long since have moved on to explore the possibilities of more recent innovations.
For them, evolution is not over, and innovation will never cease.
Those innovators within pharma who are forging its digital future are not distracted by the chimerical threat of adverse events, interminable discussions regarding regulations, or the comfortable futility of considering the various merits and disadvantages of this week’s new hardware or social platform.
In order to thrive within healthcare’s global future, pharma innovators understand that companies will need to:
- Reform corporate strategies around the principles of social business
- Be instrumental in precipitating the transition from treatment to prevention in healthcare
- Find ways to add value to the shared decision making agenda
- Socialise the clinical trial process
- Become a trusted provider of accurate, balanced information about its own products in discoverable contexts such as Wikipedia
- Move to, and then move beyond, mobile-first development
- Make sensor technologies, genomics and personalised medicine central to the future development of their enterprise
- Adopt open technologies
- Deploy secure, cloud-based solutions
- Support intrapreneurial activities
Hat tip to Johnathan Reid (@FarmerFunster) for reminding me how valuable and productive a concept intrapreneurialism is.
Tagged: pharma, social business
