Growth Champions: The Battle for Sustained Innovation Leadership

CHAPTER 10

Narayana Hrudayalaya and Novo Nordisk

Reinventing healthcare

Novo Nordisk and Narayana Hrudayalaya have both outpaced their larger competitors in the healthcare sector by changing the way they work with the broader ecosystem. They have pioneered different approaches to business model innovation – Novo Nordisk through building a world-leading interconnection of drug delivery and education; and Narayana Hrudayalaya by completely reinventing surgery for scale. Both have delivered the goods in this highly competitive arena. They have become the benchmarks for the future but have done so with different emphases from each other.

For many years the world's healthcare systems and most of the participating organizations have been less interested in healthcare and more focused on sick-care. Dealing with patients after they have had an accident, caught a disease, or fallen into ill health has been where the vast majority of money has been spent and so where many companies have prioritized their activities. Consequently after years of investment and progress, we now have multiple high-technology systems capable of repairing our bodies and extending our lives for pretty much as long as we, or our healthcare system, can afford the bills.

Now that there are more of us on the planet, and on average we are living longer, the system is starting to undergo stress. Add in increasingly unhealthily ...