Specializing in Strategy and Innovation at a System Level
Making a Narrative Turn
Roadmaps to the next hundred billion in growth from the largest and most lucrative market on Earth don’t start with “data interoperability” to enable big tech visions. They start with ‘market interoperability’ to invent better economic systems (“ecosystems”).
Ecosystem-centered market strategy is a platform shift in health innovation. It’s a unique way to deal with competitive pressure, and stock market pressure. The ambition isn’t producing another technical product to make the “horseless carriage” run more efficiently; it’s inventing ‘the automobile’ as an economic concept around which new markets are born.
Blue Spoon is a unique capability to help brands, businesses and industries construct new markets, new growth curves and ‘gravitational pull’ into a new orbit for competition.
In healthcare, it's not just one market that drives innovation and determines “value” but an infinite flow of them. If you accept that premise as your jumping-off point, then what follows is this simple idea: real strategic advantage goes to the side with the skills to harness a carnival of markets and manage them as a single economic unit, as a system of markets, cohering and collaborating on shared space for growth.
Call it the Big Strategic Rotation.
PREMIUM CONTENT
A New System of Markets in Alzheimer’s
The ‘rough mix’ of markets positioned here can be combined into an ecosystem with annual revenue of $860 billion
NEW MARKET PERSPECTIVE
Executive Leaders’ Wile E. Coyote Moment
On ‘The McKinsey Method’
Why Pharma Needs to Think Like Quentin Tarantino
Creating New Economic Systems
Healthcare is one of the most hellishly complex businesses in the world. Many with deep pockets and expert knowledge have attempted to "fix" it; none have been successful. From our perspective, the reason why not is simple: strategic problems don’t have technical solutions.
Healthcare is the economy, not something statistically separate from it.
We believe really big growth curves in healthcare start with a new format of interaction between markets. The objective is not “data interoperability” but market interoperability. “Strategy” becomes the imagination and skill to align the ‘commercial determinants of health’ — intentionally combining the life sciences market + healthcare market + technology market + government market — into new economic systems.
This is a new kind of creative vision.
You can’t tech your way to “fixing” healthcare. The better way to script market access is through market integration, where “value” becomes a flow, not an end state. It's not just one market that produces a health outcome; it's an infinite number of markets interacting simultaneously over time, as a cohesive ecosystem.
Today, a winning strategy is less about one dimensional “piece vs. piece” competition, but playing a new, three-dimensional game with systems thinking, where the goal is shifting the center-of-gravity for power and control.
Blue Spoon is different.
Our unique perspective comes from applying systems theory to help leaders understand and navigate the deep chaos and complexity of the moment. We work across contexts to position and sell strategic vision, define objectives and invent leverage to displace embedded economic systems. We do this from a novel vantage point and base of experience, helping you shape a sustainable, if not unassailable, edge.
Superwinners Aggregate
As competitive convergence comes to define most industries, as technology becomes a commodity input, and as outcomes-based pricing gains traction as the only real differentiator, the process knowledge to position, sell and manage new economic systems becomes a next-level capability.
Big Design is our method to mold the ever-expanding galaxy of technological possibilities and market fragments into new business and industry ecosystems. It’s an approach to invent high-quality growth using different assumptions about innovation, competition and models of value alignment.
Fundamentally, Blue Spoon is a platform for market innovation.
We are pushing the envelope further and faster than most, able to fuse commercial opportunity with computational imagination. It's not cheap or easy to make technology upgrades flexible enough to ingest an infinite, accelerating cascade of digital applications. It's not cheap or easy to shift the center-of-gravity for market engagement to be based on outcomes, rather than technical potential of a product. Organizational change and evolution must happen cross-functionally; ideally, it is change that dissolves divisions and is designed collaboratively, with customers and partners in adjacent markets.
We are a unique creative practice centered on enabling strategic leadership. The capability to make this happen is fluency in systems thinking.
We Are Light Weight
We believe in an efficient approach, not an inflated consulting engagement.
In addition to a ‘complete vision’ from decades of experience spanning pharmaceutical, medical device, provider, and payer domains, the Blue Spoon advantage lies in a service model based on working personally and quickly with your business and technology teams (and vendors), supplementing where necessary with a unique, bespoke network of partners, collaborators and novel industry relationships.
We help your teams step out of convention and cliche, see space for differentiation, and create new structures of ideas to operate with originality. Our aim is only a handful of clients. Many of our projects can be completed in days, and at a fraction of the cost of conventional strategy and innovation consultancies.
A New Vantage Point
Our mission is to lead the next cycle of evolution in the business and economics of healthcare.
Continuous health engagement is the real ‘strategic transformation’ in a $4 trillion market. Competing on outcomes is the story behind all other stories about what it means to “disrupt” systemically. It means adapting to a massive shift underway in how the world works and thinks, and what consumers expect.
There are billions at stake in making the right strategic moves.
Positioning business models for value-based success comes from thinking outside the clinical setting, with a whole new taxonomy for market innovation -- less "patient adherence" to a drug or device, more aligning and curating the ‘commercial determinants of health’ as a new economic system. Against this backdrop, we help you work through the complexity of options that can be brought to bear to enable a novel strategy, one centered on the value customers are really craving.