on medical education help GHX get into the right conversation with its clients about how to positively impact the Triple Aim goals? Probably not. While there are plenty of disruptions happening in the medical education space, it is not the best edge of disruption for GHX to explore—it might be someone else’s, but it likely isn’t for GHX. Being selective about your edge of disruption is critical—remember Bruce’s criteria of unique and scalable for GHX. As you look for the right edge of disruption, being able to say “no” is critical, and is a skill we will revisit in several of our case studies.
Defining your edge of disruption is about looking toward the future, determining where your capabilities and credibility uniquely position you to take advantage of the wide array of changes you see there, and developing a unique perspective about the disruption these changes will bring. You then use that perspective to drive meaningful insight for the people you need to influence the most.
Likewise for you, there are many problems in the world to solve, and many exciting new opportunities and spaces to explore, but you need to be selective in defining your edge of disruption. Defining your edge of disruption is about looking toward the future, determining where your capabilities and credibility uniquely position you to take advantage of the wide array of changes you see there, and developing a unique perspective about the disruption these changes will bring. You then use that perspective to drive meaningful insight for the people you need to influence the most.
Let’s think about where you might find your own edge of disruption. To be clear, we are not suggesting that with an elevated perspective, you need to be an expert on all areas of your business and that of your customers. We are, however, suggesting that you need to figure out the edge of disruption that is most likely to matter to your customers—where you can add the most value, and about which you have the most to say—and go there. Everyone has a different edge of disruption, depending on interest, industry, competition, customer base, strategic goals, and market position, so figuring out yours is critical.
As you work on defining your edge, you will need to take a hard look at what’s going on around you. It might feel unsettling, or even scary, but it is a critical step to becoming the obvious choice. Places to look for your edge of disruption include the contracting process (especially if you are in a business-to-business model; we’re going to share an example of how that can yield amazing outcomes), customer experience, product positioning, technology, customer relationship, service models, internal data and information, areas where legislation is looming, changes in adjacent industries, and other parts of the value chain. We believe that wherever you go to find your edge of disruption, it should ultimately generate market-facing value. It must have an impact on your customers, and if appropriate, your customers’ customers. For GHX, its leaders look for edges of disruption where they can advance all three Triple Aim goals and uniquely deliver scalable solutions to their customers in ways that matter. So yes, healthcare has plenty of complexities to explore, but they aren’t all good opportunities for every player in the industry. And even industries that seem more mundane and less complicated have pushed out onto edges of disruption to challenge norms and create new products, markets, and ways of working.
As you start to think about defining your own edge of disruption, let’s consider an example that everyone has experienced— grocery shopping. In 1916, grocery shoppers typically made a list, brought it to the store, and handed it to a clerk, who would then fill the entire order, bag it, and give the shopper a total price. That’s just how it was done. If you asked a grocer in 1916 about how his business worked, he would have talked about the importance of clerks knowing everything about all the inventory and managing the customer experience. If you had asked customers what they needed or wanted in their shopping experience, they likely would have said faster clerks and lower prices.
Saunders didn’t just ask customers what they wanted. And he didn’t try to do what his competition was doing . . . he looked at what was happening . . . synthesized it with what he knew about the economics of his business, had the courage to challenge the assumptions almost everyone was making about shopping for groceries, and single-handedly reinvented the experience.
In the face of deeply held beliefs about how to shop for groceries, a guy named Clarence Saunders was optimistic enough about the industry to launch his own unique brand, and curious enough to challenge many of the deeply held assumptions about how people shopped for groceries. He set his sights on the customer’s shopping experience as his edge of disruption when he opened the first Piggly Wiggly in 1916. It was the first grocery store to use checkout lanes and to price each individual product so that shoppers could browse and select for themselves—using a radical new object Saunders invented called a shopping cart. He was the first to create this self-service format, overcoming deeply held industry and customer beliefs about what the ideal grocery-shopping experience looked and felt like. Saunders didn’t just ask customers what they wanted—the likelihood of them coming up with checkout lanes was incredibly remote. And he didn’t try to do what his competition was doing, only better or cheaper or with nicer people. Instead, he looked at what was happening in retail and in the way shoppers were starting to behave, synthesized it with what he knew about the economics of his business, had the courage to challenge the assumptions almost everyone was making about shopping for groceries, and single-handedly reinvented the experience.1
Fast-forward almost 100 years and Saunders’s self-service format, so radical when he first launched it, is still the norm for the industry. He was truly on the edge of disruption in 1916, and he created an enduring model as a result. In an interesting twist, today grocers are starting to experiment with “concierge service,” where shoppers order online and drive up for curbside pickup, and a clerk loads their bags into the car (sound familiar?). Why take this on? Because grocers are seeing the disruptions that are happening around them and they are defining their new edge of disruption in the shopping experience.
As the grocery industry shifts to accommodate these changing shopping behaviors, one company, Homeplus (owned by Tesco), decided to take a radically new approach. It defined for itself a new edge of disruption to explore—one invested in technology, shifting cultural norms, activity in adjacent sectors, and the reinvigoration of a historic business model while solving for how to create a new shopping experience. While the competition installed self-scanner technology for customers to use in the traditional checkout environment, Homeplus ventured out into the real world of its customers. Let’s take a look at what has become a case study for defining your edge of disruption in the real world.2
In 2015, Homeplus was succeeding as the second-largest Korean grocery retailer, with more than 400 stores serving 6 million customers weekly.3 Flash back to 2011, though, and the company was concerned about losing sales to online retailers (e-tailers). Homeplus did have a conventional website for ordering products, but it felt vulnerable to dedicated e-tailers. South Korea was by most measures the world’s most web-savvy country, with 84 percent of its more than 40 million residents using the internet. Residents especially loved using their smartphones to order all sorts of retail goods on the spot. But in 2011, grocery had eluded the e-tailing boom, and shopping for groceries online represented only 2 to 3 percent of Homeplus’s market.
On the face of it, there was no need to push e-tailing forward. Indeed, it would seem to be in Homeplus’s interest not to—it had plenty to focus on in its traditional business operations to compete with the other traditional grocery stores. The more pessimistic or defensive-minded thinkers in the industry might have been inclined to simply continue to work in the current model, driving out cost and other internal operations in traditional environments—the place where they were comfortable working.
But Homeplus executives were reportedly curious about an unanswered question in the market. They had noticed some developments in other adjacent markets that pointed toward e-tailing being important in Homeplus’s own market. The staggering adoption and use of apps on smartphones was a cultural phenomenon in South Korea. In parallel, in the United States, online sales of staple products like diapers
