Matter. Julie Williamson
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LEARN: Establish Your Point of View
WHEN HOMEPLUS DEFINED the customer shopping experience as its edge of disruption, it invested in a six-week pilot that had remarkable success. The pilot was designed to interact with shoppers in a new way, and once an order was placed through the app, within three hours, Homeplus would have the order at the customer’s door, guaranteed. Brilliant, right? The pilot sparked a massive public reaction, and Homeplus saw a spike in sales, but consumers overwhelmingly indicated that a three-hour delivery time was too long, and the spike quickly died down after the “first impression” bubble burst.
Before you become distracted by an internal soliloquy about the state of modern society and our impatience, it’s important to understand that it was not that three hours was not an extraordinary logistical achievement, but rather that it was too long a window of time to not know when the Homeplus delivery guy would be at your home. It is understandable that the Homeplus team assumed customers would be wowed by the three-hour delivery window, and that they overlooked the effect of the length of that window on customers’ lives. This is why Homeplus’s willingness to take an intelligent and controlled risk—and actually test the concept in the market—was such a strong way to learn at its edge of disruption.
TAKE INTELLIGENT RISKS IN THE REAL WORLD
Homeplus had found a new edge of disruption—e-tailing. But it had to learn more about it to elevate its perspective and fully solve the challenge. Some investigating turned up interesting results. The company took a deep look at the market demographics for its targeted consumers. Residents of Seoul already work some of the longest hours on earth.1 When they aren’t working, they generally prefer to spend time in their neighborhood rather than at home. Given those cultural norms, three hours was too long a window; it did not offer enough flexibility to accommodate the typical lifestyle of the customers. So, after the initial six-week trial, Homeplus began tweaking the approach, looking at different delivery options and pickup stations, gradually growing its presence in the e-tailing space based on what it had learned. The original idea was ultimately a market failure in some ways, but what it taught Homeplus was invaluable. The knowledge helped Homeplus to develop a strong point of view on the future of the customer experience in buying groceries and the role Homeplus could play in that space. Thus the Homeplus leadership team invested in a relatively controlled, intelligent risk in exchange for valuable insight, without betting the farm. It shows the value of courage, optimism, and curiosity in defining a company’s edge of disruption, and the need to push further into learning about the edge for a fairly traditional industry.
If a grocer can do it in the face of massive legacy real estate and capital investments, so can you. Think about your team, your region, your function, or your company—wherever you have line of sight. What controlled risks could you take to learn how you could matter more to your internal or external customers?
You might be thinking that grocery is one thing, but your business is far more complex than selling fruit to people (and trust us, so is the grocery business). The truth is, everyone has these challenges, but exceptional companies find ways to deal with them. As we shared in the introduction to this section, from its inception GHX has been faced with a Gordian knot— so many intertwined and dependent challenges that it can feel unsolvable. But GHX stepped into the complexity of the US healthcare system, and into other geographies as well. In doing so, it has created the space for customers, competitors, suppliers, and others in the industry to come together and collaborate on solutions. By bringing these diverse market views together, GHX has been able to continually redefine its edge of disruption and solve some of the most complex problems in the cost of healthcare. GHX has done this by being willing to take intelligent risks that are grounded in a core belief in the value of co-creating with its customers and its market.
CO-CREATE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS AND YOUR MARKET
Henry Ford reportedly once said that “coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” If you buy into that, co-creating with your customers and your market to learn about your edge of disruption and establish your point of view is the ultimate measure of success. In our experience, no one does this better than GHX. As its success confirms, engaging your customers and your market in co-creating—both in defining and solving for your edge of disruption—creates tremendous respect for your ability to bring people together around interesting challenges. And you often fast-track the sales process later on, because people are primed to buy solutions they helped to build. Working together to solve systemic problems creates more value for everyone—you, your customers, their customers, your competitors, and the industry as a whole. Starting this early by co-creating possible solutions with outsiders gives you the ability to create solutions that matter more than any that the participants can accomplish individually, and being the company that creates the space for co-creation gives you the strongest position for maximizing your value contribution.
Think back to what we’ve shared about GHX. It occupies a unique place in healthcare as a company that was created by five competitors and originally chartered to fill a very specific need. By its very founding, GHX was placed in the middle of its market, and it had to negotiate, partner, cajole, convince, and, yes, even push others in the industry to join in what was at the time a bit of an experiment in e-commerce. Over the years, this position has helped GHX to find a confident position as a convener of ideas, a place where its customers and the rest of the market can come together to co-create solutions to some of the most difficult challenges in healthcare today.
But it wasn’t always a given that GHX would have the ability to effectively co-create with its customers and its market. It had some significant obstacles to overcome, including building trust among competitors and between suppliers and buyers, protecting its neutrality in the process, and convincing the industry that GHX had the capability and the influence to effectively create a collaborative space. You may encounter some of these obstacles as well. It can be scary to go out to customers or others and actually not have answers to the big problems, but what GHX has learned is that by asking the right questions, you demonstrate your strength and the value of your involvement, and you wind up with better solutions. Knowing what questions to ask and what solutions to invite your customers and your market into solving will enhance your reputation as an organization that matters more, because you will be creating more value for the industry, for your customers, and for yourself.
Knowing what questions to ask and what solutions to invite your customers and your market into solving will enhance your reputation as an organization that matters more, because you will be creating more value for the industry, for your customers, and for yourself.
Earlier in this section we mentioned the challenges related to tracking implantables. There were plenty of questions to ask, and even more solutions to explore for this problem. As we talked with GHX’s Karen Conway, executive director, industry relations, and Margot Drees, VP of global strategy, about the evolution of the industry discussions, they highlighted three important outcomes from the process of co-creation.2 First, GHX gained traction for the development of its own part of the solution. Second, by driving industry alignment, GHX had better visibility into the larger problem and how it could help add more value. Third, and related to product development, was a significant lesson from the process of co-creating with the market. It might seem counterintuitive, but this lesson is all about going broad and ambitious for a moment, and then narrowing your focus to a solvable piece to deliver that makes progress against the bigger challenge. Let’s take a closer look.
In 2010 GHX started internally discussing the opportunity related to tracking medical devices, and in 2011 it invited its partners in the industry to begin the hard work of defining and learning about this new edge of disruption. In bringing all the right people together and fully appreciating the breadth of the problem, GHX was able to drive the creation of an exciting and creative demonstration of what “could be” for