Keynote Address--the Innovator's Prescription: An Examination of the Future of Health Care Through the Lenses of Disruptive Innovation (Conference News‪)‬

I want to give credit where it is due and mention that during the past 3 years I have had the privilege of working with Professor Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School (Boston, Massachusetts), and his ideas and groundbreaking research are really the foundation of many of the concepts that I am going to present to you. The whole idea of disruptive innovation comes from the world of business, and it is rooted in the observation that if you were to go through and scan through the annals of business history, most of the companies that were at one time considered to be unassailably successful, within a decade or two, found themselves running in the middle of the pack, or worse, at the bottom of the heap. And this observation really did not make sense at first because at one time when these companies were high flyers, all of the trade magazines and leaders of the industry commended the management of these companies, talking about how brilliant they were in leading these companies to the top of their business, and yet a decade or two later when these same managers were in charge, they were criticized for running their companies into the ground. It did not make sense that it happened with such frequency and regularity that all of a sudden managers could suddenly become stupid and turn their companies to dust. The observation was made in Professor Christensen's initial research that it was actually the principles of good management that were being taught at Harvard and other business schools around the country and the world that were causing these successful businesses to fail. The initial message that came out of the first book, The Innovator's Dilemma, was that if you somehow became wildly successful by doing everything right, you were doomed. (1) (Unfortunately, they did not tell me this until I paid 2 years' worth of tuition to Harvard Business School.)