Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Contest for Disruptive Innovations in Health Care

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is sponsoring a contest for Disruptive Innovations in Health Care: "an open source competition to identify ways in which the health and health care marketplace can offer services, tools and choices that consumers want -- but are currently out of reach because of cost, complexity or because the right idea hasn't come along." Winners get $5,000 cash and a chance to receive further funding up to $5 million.

Contests and other incentives can be great ways to tap into the creative resources of many people in the quest for disruption. Will anything come of this effort? Perhaps. Meanwhile, corporations seeking to protect their future need to regularly examine their systems and incentives. Are there barriers to innovation within the company, or is there a system that welcomes and rewards valuable and potentially disruptive concepts? Talk to your creative people and perhaps you'll find more barriers than you imagined! This is part of the plight of "innovation fatigue" that I'll discuss more in the future.

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