Pre-Competitive Collaboration to Build the Health Innovation Highway
Posted by Lisa
Many of you have heard me speak or have read on this blog about pre-competitive collaboration. This is where competitor companies analyze their processes and determine which ones are pre-competitive (i.e. are common to all competitors in their industry and don’t differentiate them from others in the marketplace). These processes are the obvious low-hanging-fruit for collaboration between competitors, as they’re typically associated with the lowest risk of exposing differentiating intellectual property, and have the potential for the greatest impact on savings through sharing of common costs.
We’ve spoken before about the many hotspots of pre-competitive collaboration springing up across all industries. This is extremely prevalent in the healthcare industry, where companies are struggling with reduced revenues due to the economy, and the dour forecast of even lower revenues and increased internal costs resulting from new government regulation. In a recent article in Fast Company, Adrian Ott highlights many of these rising hotbeds of collaboration between competitors in the healthcare arena. Their drivers and objectives vary, but the success they believe they can accomplish by working together will not only make their companies stronger, but potentially change the face of healthcare as we know it.