about your understanding of your right edge of disruption is one of the underlying objectives of co-creating. You don’t want to go around giving out PowerPoint Promises. That kind of reputation will never give you the access you need to influence the marketplace. As you define your edge of disruption, remember that refining your ideas and narrowing your focus are a part of the process. Once the larger problem has been clearly articulated, achievable step solutions are legitimate ways to add more value.
As you define your edge of disruption, remember that refining your ideas and narrowing your focus are a part of the process. Once the larger problem has been clearly articulated, achievable step solutions are legitimate ways to add more value.
GHX has co-created with its market in other areas as well. In 2008, it began a similar journey to facilitate traceability of pharmaceuticals, an area with problems similar to implantables. It is very difficult to track down the ultimate recipient of a prescription, making timely recalls and patient notification incredibly hard if not impossible. More importantly, the pharmaceutical industry has issues with drugs being counterfeited, adulterated, and diverted from their proper destinations. These challenges can be addressed with a comprehensive approach to tracking and tracing pharmaceuticals, but again, no one organization could possibly own and deliver that end-to-end solution. As a result, almost twenty organizations in the industry participated in early discussions about the problem, including suppliers, providers, regulators, industry associations, and of course, GHX as the host.
Phase 1 for pharmaceuticals was a collaborative effort to develop requirements for the industry to define an Interoperable Track and Trace System that would provide a simple and accessible solution for users across the healthcare system. Phase 2 included building a prototype of a working interoperable system, designed to use prototyping to uncover additional requirements and further learning about how to handle security issues in a potential solution. The insights from Phase 2 were further used to engage with and inform regulators and policy makers, who play a very active role in healthcare. Using this iterative process, the working team was able to produce an exciting result for everyone.
The effort culminated in 2013 with the delivery of an end-to-end solution in a “live” scenario that included AbbVie, Inc., McKesson, and the Veterans Health Administration to jointly deliver an award-winning proof of concept that demonstrated full traceability on an interoperable system.3 In addition to those companies participating in the demonstration, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Systems, AmerisourceBergen, and others contributed to the development of the system. It was truly a collaborative effort from across the industry, and it provided a breakthrough moment in making what seemed impossible a reality. Out of that work, the industry is on its way to implementing real change in how pharmaceuticals are tracked, and everyone who participated in the effort has an opportunity to matter more as the solutions are designed and implemented across the industry.
Looking at these two examples, it would appear that the edge of disruption for GHX in this space isn’t just implantables or pharmaceuticals—it’s Track and Trace across the entire healthcare supply chain, or any other systemic problem that requires cross-industry collaboration! What GHX has learned about how to successfully define, develop, and execute co-created solutions in healthcare is unparalleled. The benefits to GHX of learning about the challenges it wants to solve through co-creation with its market cannot be overstated. The access these co-created activities provide is clear, especially as GHX nurtures elevated relationships (more on that in the next section).
For now, note that the co-creation approach gives GHX deep insight and knowledge to guide product development. It was also able to confirm that it was working at a meaningful edge of disruption, one that mattered more to its customers and other influencers in healthcare. Last, GHX has had an influential seat at the table for some of the most important conversations in their industry, and many clients would likely suggest that, going forward, it would be crazy to talk about something like Track and Trace without GHX in the room.
Consider that in September 2014, the US Food and Drug Administration (which regulates medical devices) published a final rule that includes the requirement for a unique device identifier to support tracking of medical devices, as well as a larger mandate related to product data. Luckily, thanks in part to GHX and its efforts to co-create a solution, the industry has already gotten a head start on solving this new challenge. Who do you think the manufacturers reach out to as they adapt to this new regulation, which is devastatingly complex to comply with in the real world? GHX may not own the end-to-end work, but having an end-to-end solution envisioned makes any individual piece more impactful and stickier—it matters more. The added value of co-creating when you are learning about your edge of disruption is that it amplifies rather than diminishes the value of the work you decide to do.
As a convener in the industry, GHX doesn’t shy away from tackling big and thorny problems, or from spending time— sometimes years—bringing the market along and crafting viable solutions that will resonate with customers. GHX’s success shows that you can’t be afraid of big problems, or of solutions that take time to evolve. In a complex industry with many challenges, there may not be many “quick and easy” solutions for the problems that matter the most, but unless someone has the courage to step out and bring their customers and the market together, those problems won’t get solved effectively.
The same is true in complex organizations. Perhaps you are trying to improve from within. Engaging people outside your team—your internal customers and your larger organization— to co-create a solution can be effective, but don’t expect results overnight. You may have to authentically be in it for the long haul to create something that matters. Homeplus was able to test a new go-to-market approach with a few weeks of a strong marketing campaign supported by a reasonably isolated technology infrastructure, and it generated results that matter. We aren’t saying it always takes years; however, don’t be afraid of the solutions that do require more effort and time.
As you work to learn about your edge of disruption, you may find you have more questions than answers. You may not even have the problem fully defined. GHX is exceptionally good at co-creating a problem definition and solutions with its customers and its market, and we recommend you consider this approach as you work to learn about your edge. Another approach is to make sure you “know what you know.” This takes a commitment to catalog and leverage your organizational knowledge and expertise to continually push forward on the edge of disruption, which helps you to learn as much as you can about the value you can create. And we haven’t found many companies that know what they know better than DPR.
If you were to meet Doug Woods at a shopping center, you would think he was a knockabout kind of guy. Someone who attends every one of his son’s football games, cooks good ribs, and appears to be in the manual trades. You certainly wouldn’t think that he, and the company he cofounded, might have built the very shopping center you were in, and more likely built the highly complex data center that the retail brands in the shopping center use to give you that special loyalty discount you crave so much. Oh, and you probably wouldn’t think that his company also may have built the high-tech science laboratory that sits next to the very field on which he likes to watch his son play football.
Doug Woods is a shockingly humble guy, which we are convinced is part of the reason that DPR (as we noted in the Introduction, he is the D in DPR) has a sustained discipline of seeking feedback, learning from its experiences, and pushing “ever forward” to matter more to its customers tomorrow than it does today.
Through our conversations with DPR, we discovered that you can often learn a tremendous amount about your edge of disruption when you look right in front of you: at your people, your suppliers, your contractors, and your customers. They all have experiences that help you to better understand your edge of disruption. It takes courage and humility to ask about those experiences, learn from them, and synthesize them to find and stay
