Product vs. Process Innovation

In studying Innovation, one of the themes is that as products and industries mature, the nature of innovation shifts from PRODUCT innovation to PROCESS innovation.  A professor at MIT Sloan, James Utterback, outlines this concept in Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation - How Companies Can Seize Opportunities in the Face of Technological Change (1994, Harvard College), p. 91:

In healthcare, I view the overall process to be described by this flow diagram, starting from access to diagnostics to thearpy to outcomes to Value, both clinical and economic:

With the economic system in the U.S., the medical device & pharmaceutical industry has been incented to develop tremendous technological solutions for treatment, and to some extent diagnostics as well.  Therefore I would hypothesize that the PRODUCT innovation has been maximized in these two areas - i.e. the pacemakers, stents, spinal implants, drugs, MRI's, ultrasound scanners, etc. have reached close to a plateau in terms of the functional capabilities they possess.  Even with greater investment in these areas, alone they cannot increase overall clinical and economic value to the healthcare system.

In contrast, technologies that enhance the FLOW, EFFICIENCY and THROUGHPUT of patients in the healthcare system have much greater potential for additional clinical and economic value.  I will be looking at the problem of cost reduction in healthcare using these frameworks as my foundation.