Healthcare markets are complex and require a strategy that addresses the unique needs of different customers. To innovate effectively in these markets, companies must consider the needs of the beneficiaries, executors, and purchase decision makers. Creating solutions that target all three of these groups will ultimately lead to equity value creation.
In healthcare markets, defining the customer is crucial and should be done based on the beneficiaries and their unmet needs. Building an optimal innovation strategy then involves considering the customer, the job, and unmet needs. The goal is to create effective and growing healthcare solutions that are creating equity value by helping the beneficiaries.
The Apple Watch is a great example of how healthcare innovation can create equity value by targeting beneficiaries, executors, and decision makers. In this case, the beneficiary is the person who wears the watch, who benefits from having important health metrics measured and monitored on a daily basis. The executors, such as the doctors, benefit from receiving more accurate and timely information about the wearer's health, which helps them make better decisions about treatment. Finally, the decision makers, such as insurance companies, benefit from the lower cost of insurance resulting from early detection of health problems and improved patient outcomes.
The Apple Watch has many features that demonstrate how it addresses the unmet needs of these different customer segments. For example, it can measure and monitor important health metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and more. This information is constantly being collected and analyzed, and if any of the metrics fall outside of a normal range, the watch will alert the wearer to contact their doctor for a more in-depth examination.
This example shows how moving into different job steps can help create more and more value over time. The Apple Watch starts by addressing the basic need of measuring important health metrics, but as the technology improves and more data is collected, it will likely be able to address even more complex health problems in the future. This is how equity value is created in healthcare markets - by constantly looking for ways to address unmet needs and help the customer get the whole job done.
To identify the most underserved and unmet needs in the market, companies should focus on the jobs their customers are trying to perform and the struggles they face in doing so. By moving into different job steps, companies can take over more of the job and create more equity value over time.
Seventh Sense, a biotech company focused on obtaining blood samples in the context of clinical trials, offers another example on expanding job steps. The company’s goal is to create a solution that makes the process of taking a blood sample more accurate and less painful for patients, while also providing more data for the evaluation of drugs. By making the blood collection tube more intelligent and incorporating software that can analyze the information obtained from the blood sample, Seventh Sense can provide value to beyond the collection step, easing the larger hassles within clinical trials. Over time, the company can take over more of the job, which is likely to result in greater equity value creation.
Healthcare markets require a strategy that considers the beneficiaries, executors, and purchase decision makers. To create equity value, companies must identify the group of people struggling with a specific job and target them, and continuously innovate to improve the job domain. The goal is to create effective and growing healthcare solutions that benefit the job beneficiaries.
