New Business Models for Technology Innovation in Healthcare: A Value Network Perspective

Abstract

Business models (BMs) play an important role in facilitating the delivery and integration of technological innovations within the healthcare sector, catering the needs of healthtech entrepreneurs, managers, healthcare providers, researchers and policy makers. However, despite the BM’s significance, existing conceptualisations of BM do not adequately guide in designing them taking into account the complexities of the healthcare environment. This demands a dynamic approach in designing BM, considering the healthcare value chain stakeholders’ thoughts, values, prejudices, views, feelings and perspectives. With the exploratory nature and lack of research in this area, the overall aim of the study is to design an innovative BM founded on the concept of value co-creation and will seek to provide a holistic view of the healthcare technology value chain. Specific objectives include to establish and prioritise the key factors of innovative BM development in healthcare diagnostic technologies. Based on the systematic literature review, this study has developed a conceptual BM formed with four value dimensions: the (1) value offering, (2) value delivery, (3) value network, (4) value capture. This has been used to synthesise the empirical study which is conducted in 3 phases. First, thematic analysis was conducted on thirty in-depth semi-structured interviews involving experienced stakeholders in the healthcare value chain. This process led to the identification of 34 BM factors. Subsequently, a second round of data collection employed structured interviews to apply Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) in order to uncover the interrelationships among the identified BM factors. The resulting TISM model was formed to visualise the factor dependencies. Finally, the output of TISM forms the input for Matrice d’Impacts croises-multipication appliqu´ean classment (cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) MICMAC analysis to classify and prioritise the factors based on their ability to influence other factors. The findings highlight indicate that the certain factors including Meeting the needs of the current standard of care, Satisfied regulatory clearance, Earning trust of stakeholders, Effective sales channel, Regulatory approval, Managing costs, and Economical and political environment, possess the highest driving power and are situated at the lowest level of the TISM hierarchy. Thus, they should be given top priority in healthtech BM. This study has a number of theoretical contributions including the development of an BM framework incorporating the full value circle for healthcare technology. Secondly, it provides empirical evidence in identifying BM factors incorporating healthcare stakeholders’ views. Thirdly, it prioritises BM factors by establishing interrelationships among them through TISM and categorising them with MICMAC analysis. Finally, this research serves guidance to practitioners and biotech entrepreneurs to help them to make better decisions in addressing BM related priorities by using the BM framework developed.