Leadership & Business

Are You An Idea Killer?

My new Inc. column, entitled Beware of the Idea Killers is out and focuses on how new ideas are what will help your business remain competitive. However, be sure you aren't killing them before you consider bringing them to fruition.

As Innovation remains a hot topic in 2008 and as executive teams continue struggling to build effective, sustainable, and measurable innovation programs. The battleground becomes how to structure innovation departments, drive company-wide innovation initiatives, and sustain efforts over the long haul.

To help executives with these challenges my company, Breakthrough Management Group (BMG) is hosting a 2-day Executive Seminar February 25-26 in Denver, CO, entitled Chief Innovation Officer: Lead Your Company’s Growth and Innovation Efforts.

This is the third CIO course for BMG.  We hosted two similar events in 2007, each time heralding attendees from industries as diverse as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and financial services into one room to discuss and learn about what they all have in common – the need to better drive growth and innovation in order to compete in the future. Past attendees include, Levi Strauss, AVNET, Circuit City, NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation and GE Energy to name a few.

If you are interested in Innovation and what it really takes to lead your company to the forefront, I highly recommend this course. More information can be found here.

Healthcare Costs – The Real Story

Fact: During the period 2000-2003, the average annual increase in personal health care expenditures was 8.2 percent. This equates to $4,866 per capita in 2003 (compared to $2,398 in 1990). ⁴

Note that this statistic specifies “expenditures” – what we are spending on healthcare in this country. We tend to use the terms “spending” and “costs” interchangeably, but this only discourages the notion that disparate factors could be affecting costs versus spending.

Let’s compare healthcare to another booming industry – consumer electronics. In the 1970s, you could get a color television for around $250 and a transistor radio for $25 (adjusted for 2004 inflation, that’s $1,051 and $105 respectively). Now, however, many of us can (and routinely do) drop thousands of dollars on a TV, and hundreds more on a stereo system. Comparing apples to oranges? Sure. A high-definition, widescreen, plasma TV is a different animal than a 1970’s era color TV. But that’s exactly the point. We’re buying better toys. Not just better, more toys too. According to the Consumer Electronics Association, the average U.S. household now owns 25 consumer electronics products and spends more than $1,250 annually on electronics.⁵ Better and more toys, contributing to retail sales of over $125 billion in 2005, and all the while the cost of producing electronic components and accessories has gone down.

Similarly, much of the available healthcare data supports an increase in spending and quality (as opposed to costs). For example, over the past 30 years, there has been a steady decline in visits to general and family practitioners, but a 60% increase in visits to specialists.⁶ We are choosing to pay more for specialists, and in return we receive the expertise and advanced procedures that only a specialist can provide for many ailments.