Based on a talk for the Southern Ohio branch of the Project Management Institute (Healthcare group). Many thanks to PMI for their sponsorship. Healthcare innovation has been led by technology providers, almost entirely, over the period we consider relevant to “innovation” (1970’s – current). Innovation has been a supply-side approach, led by information technology (EMRs and Health IT platforms) and medical devices (ranging from user-controllable diffusion pumps to CAT machines). Only recently have clinical services become the focus of innovation, ranging from patient-centered care to new practice models (the ACO and PCMH) and business models. Yet even service innovations emerge from the supply side – just supply-side from inside the hospital instead of industry vendors. The hospital remains a highly hierarchical entity, managed as a top-down coordination of patient bodies in space and time. The patient’s individual desires and personal circles of care are not elicited for service innovation – …
Systemic Design – An Emerging Interdiscipline
So we might ask, is there a definable field and practice of systemic design? With Jeremy Bowes, we teach a course in system titled Systemic Design in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation program at OCADU. We believe systems thinking to be one of the core “thinkings” for the SFI program (design, business, and futures thinking, “surrounded” by creative systems thinking). Over the 5 years of teaching the program and producing futures and strategic design studies for agencies and clients, we have found systemic design becoming one of the most differentiating and persuasive competencies, both in its underpinning theory and social technologies. We’ve been making the invisible college of this practice a lot more visible. Working with Birger Sevaldson at AHO, Oslo for the last few years, we’ve coordinated curriculum and methods and have exchanged workshops to develop systems thinking methods in strategic design and service design. At first, this was …
To hate on the Internets, Click Here.
In the current Guardian, American novelist Jonathan Franzen writes “What’s wrong with the modern world?” Franzen retrieves cranky German polemicist Karl Kraus from the 1930’s to buttress a literary critique of the cultural evaporation accelerated by Big Capital solutionist appropriation of the Internets. Perhaps because there are so few public techno-critics in literary culture in the 21st Century, Franzen seems to own this space for an epic rant (and new book) that pierce our culture’s enamoration with all things interactive, online, gamified, and ultimately, trivial. In the face of the scale of real-world problems faced by our civilization, Franzen is warning that our distraction with the entertaining and trivial, and our failure to invent beneficial alternatives, is costing us our culture: “… the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq …
Reframing innovation value – From products to service strategies
Shifting (Successfully) to a Knowledge-based Economy The fundamental basis of the knowledge-based economy has shifted from manufacturing (product-based) economies to production based on services and service management. The advanced economies of the US, Europe and Japan have already shifted largely to service provision. As this period has overlapped with the offloading of mass manufacturing to developing economies, the attendant disruption of skills, work, educational models, and management has been seen in fits and starts. Unlike the huge shift from the industrial age to the information age (that disrupted the 1970’s and led to the boom in the 1980’s), the service economy shift is highly configurable, and the disruption is not so obvious. Our companies and suppliers are now producing mixes of products, managed services, information technology, media, and self-service systems, a mix of offers and value that constantly changes. We in the advanced economies are also leading and producing a …
