Clay Christensen on healthcare and education

Oct 2007

Speakers: Clayton Christensen

Clay Christensen explains how it is possible to apply the analysis of business models to the reform of healthcare and education systems. He begins by discussing the necessity of using disruptive measures in business in order to stay competitive when your rivals have a head start. Drawing on the example of the iPhone, he sees a product introduced to disrupt the popularity of notebook computers. Widening the discussion, he addresses the problems afflicting the American healthcare and education establishments, stating his belief that the study of innovation in business has the power to make both these systems more efficient and effective.

For both healthcare and education, the way forward is coupling together technological innovations, or ‘enablers’, with the correct business models, allowing them to be made available to a greater majority of the population. In healthcare, the enabler is precise diagnosis, which so far remains unpaired with an effective business model. Christensen suggests that one way of doing this is to separate healthcare out into two separate institutions: one for diagnosis, performed by highly-trained experts, and one for treatment, performed by less-skilled (and therefore cheaper) healthcare workers.

For education, Christensen explains, it is necessary to move away from an ‘independent architecture’, which provides a one size fits all education, to a ‘modular architecture’, which recognises that different people have different types of intelligence, and compensates for this factor. He suggests that computer-based learning would allow different students in the same classroom to learn the same information, but in ways which are tailored to their specific type of intelligence.

Thank you to the Business Innovation Factory for making this video available.