“Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st,” says David S. Roe. In a rapidly changing world of converging technologies and business models morphing into ecosystems, there is a need for agility to deal with exponential change in healthcare and life sciences. The world used to manage scarcity of resources, capabilities, technologies, and sciences, but now we manage an abundance of the same to harness capabilities for betterment of humankind in the next decade and beyond. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the emerging business model options enabled by exponential converging technologies over the next decade.
TopAn Abundance Mindset To Change The Future Of Humanity
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead.
One’s mindset is of significant importance. It affects everything, from business model design, the communities built around it, citizen engagement, where investment takes place and overall well-being of employees, stakeholders and customer engagement. More so in the domain of healthcare and life sciences, as the businesses need to be based upon human-centred design.
It may be difficult to think of a world of abundance in an environment filled with pandemic and economic woes. Understanding the how exponential technologies impact the world opens up a world of abundance, due to far easier access to technologies such as computational power, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, the internet of things, robotics and intelligent automation.
A decade ago, only large corporate and government institutions had the resources and workforce to access and harness these technologies – the phenomena of scarcity. Today, these have been dematerialized, democratized and demonetized, so that citizens, entrepreneurs, small businesses and a larger portion of the population have relatively affordable access – the phenomena of abundance. For example, a citizen in any African country with an internet connection has access to Google, cloud computing, open source A.I. technologies and an abundance of information and data to help contribute to solving some of the largest problems on that continent, using localized knowledge and insights. Healthcare challenges in developing countries are significantly different to that of developing countries and access to an abundance of converging exponential technologies will give rise to distributed business models based upon communities of interest that collectively solve problems and harness the collective intelligence of citizens across the globe.
Healthcare resources and technologies were previously scarce and had to be shared amongst a few privileged. Adopting an abundance mindset, understanding the power of democratizing access to converging technologies allows the healthcare industry to not have to slice the pie into many slices, but make many more pies and move away from fierce competition to a world of collective creation of new capabilities and value propositions. Abundance is not about creating comfort, but rather creating a world of possibility (Diamandis, 2020).