In a Becker’s Hospital Review piece, Igor Belokrinitsky, a principal with Strategy&, PwC’s global consulting team, and John Petito, a manager with the firm, present six reasons why health-system innovation fails. Here are their ideas in stripped-down form:

1. “Treating innovation like any other project. … In times of austerity and budget cuts, innovation efforts can be perceived as non-essential, and are at greater risk of falling subject to the axe.”

2. ”Measuring the wrong things. … Measuring innovation efforts strictly by financial projections may be misleading, as financial projections for early stage and start up businesses are subject to significant uncertainty, and are easily missed.”

3. ”Not understanding the talent market. …  Leveraging traditional HR functions that don’t understand the profile or motivations of the right talent can significantly impair your innovation effort, the success of which is largely determined by having the right leaders to drive it.”

4. ”Borrowing from the corporate playbook. … {W}ithout embracing an entrepreneurial culture (e.g., focus on building MVPs, employing lightweight contracting), the innovation effort risks over-building and over-contracting products for enterprise clients without first having established product-market fit.”

5. ”Failing to keep ‘fit.’ …A coherent portfolio that supports the organization’s overall strategy not only ensures executive and board alignment, it can yield positive benefits by enabling your organization to create a compelling case to outside philanthropists, grant-providing organizations, and strategic partners.”

6. “Not ‘leaning in’  to innovation soon enough. Innovation is not for the faint of heart — it requires time, capital, focus and perseverance. Organizations sometimes seek to hedge their bets by relying on external incubators or contract resources to execute against an innovation agenda, and to avoid building the internal infrastructure required for long-term success. While this may be a viable short-term solution to “jumpstart” the effort while building your team, relying on this strategy long-term is a high cost proposition that leaves your organization vulnerable to knowledge leakage and accountability issues.”

To read the whole piece, please hit this link.
Igor Belokrinitsky is a principal with Strategy&, PwC’s global consulting team, and John Petito is a manager with the firm.