Reframing the Game

Blue Spoon is the global leader in strategy and innovation at a system level. We specialize in constructing new industry ecosystems.

Strategy at a system level is a bold new form of cooperation and creativity. It’s a ground-breaking approach to competition that shifts the locus of thinking and positioning into a new orbit, starting with a fundamental change in the style and content of leadership.

In healthcare, roadmaps to ‘the next 100 billion’ in growth from the largest and most lucrative market on Earth, what Andreessen Horowitz calls “the mother of all markets”, starts by leapfrogging complexity and with a clean slate. And if you buy into common sense, the logic that it's not just one market that determines health “value” but an infinite flow of them, then advantage goes to teams with the skills to harness a carnival of markets and manage them as a living economic system (“ecosystem”).

Blue Spoon is different.

Our unique expertise comes from applying systems theory and insights to help brand and business managers navigate the deep chaos of the moment, redraw strategies with novel vision and build market leverage from scratch. We are a capability to help you position, sell and drive ambitious plans forward, the kind of ‘commercial model innovation’ designed to yield a sustainable, if not unassailable, edge.

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.

We believe the next big growth curve in healthcare starts with ‘market interoperability’ — intentionally combining the life sciences market + healthcare market + government market as new economic systems. At stake is a new category of growth from system leadership: the capability to shift the center-of-gravity for power.

The better way to script access for “value-based healthcare” 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 economic system.

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 sustaining a system advantage.

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 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.

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.