March 28, 2002
STRATEGIC VALUE
ANAYSIS™:
Imitate-and-improve
Strategy
Robert
T. Yokl
President -The HCP
Group, Ltd.
Tom Peters tells us
that “stealing from the best with pride” is one of the best strategies
we can adopt to leap frog our competition, so that we can be leaders in
innovation in our industry. This is also one of the tenets of Strategic
Value Analysis™. With few exception, new ideas are really the recycling
or improvement over old ideas, so you don’t need to be a genius with the
IQ of Einstein to find them, adapt them or deploy them. For example,
Docutel Corporation, as small Texas upstart, first marketed the
Automated Teller Machine, which most of us use daily or weekly without
thinking about it, in the late 60’s. But it was companies like IBM and
NCR that made this idea a reality. Royal Crown Cola, not Coca Cola or
Pepsi, was the company to introduce diet and decaffeinated colas. And
the Dinner Club was the first multi-purpose third party charge card, not
American Express or Visa. Now, how can you apply this powerful concept
of imitation to your value analysis strategies to create lasting value
for your customers?
Our customers don’t
care where new ideas come from they just want to be delighted by
superior products, services and technologies that give them the best
value for their purchasing dollar. Therefore, it is our job as value
analysis practitioners to continuously monitor innovation in all
industries and surpass the pioneers with their own ideas. One of the
most famous success stories of imitation involves the microwave over
which was invented by Raytheon during World War II. Yet, it was
Japanese companies (Sharp, Sanyo, and Panasonic) who developed their own
microwaves – based on Raytheon’s technology – but were priced much lower
than Raytheon’s that took the market away from American companies in the
1980s. The Japanese weren’t first with the new microwave technology,
but in the minds of their customers price became the main feature of a
microwave product.
Steven P. Schnaars,
an expert in imitation strategies, tells us that, “nobody can
successfully pursue an “imitate-and-improve strategy” unless he or she
makes sure to maintain ongoing research and development. For value
analysis practitioners this means that you need to be constantly
researching and educating yourself on new innovations. This needs to be
done so that we can harvest the fruits that industry pioneers fail to
harvest, improve on them or adapt them to your healthcare organization
(in whole or in part), at a fraction of the cost of the originator. A
case in point, the World Wide Web!
The pioneers of the
World Wide Web, which enables us to view a myriad of sources of
information, collaboration, and e-commerce, were college professors and
the U.S Government, but it is now being harvested by businesses,
hospitals and other organizations to advertise and inform customers on
their products and services world-wide at a fraction of the cost of the
originators. Small businesses and likewise hospitals can now compete
with gigantic conglomerates and hospital systems on a new level and low
cost playing field worldwide to reach new customers that they never
dreamed of reaching before. This imitation strategy (the World-Wide
Web) should make it clear to you that your hospital is never left out of
the innovation game due to the lack of capital, labor or other
resources, since most of our innovation ideas are pioneered by small
businesses and likewise hospitals who generally lack capital and labor
to compete with the giants in their industry, but through creative
imitation they consistently beat the giants at their own
game…INNOVATION!
