Disruptive Innovation: When to Risk It and When To Play it Safe

After a year of reflection, ideation, planning, and assembling, the Naluri app is now live, on both the App Store and Google Play, and users have started to sign up to work with our professional health coaches to help them achieve their healthiest and best selves.

 I’m determined more than ever to make it work, and to try to help the hundreds of millions of people in the region who are struggling with chronic illnesses that are preventable or controllable through lifestyle behaviour changes. It’s a deeply personal mission for me, as I lost my father and close relatives to diabetes, cancer and heart disease. I always went through a personal journey from being an overweight person, struggling with high blood sugar and cholesterol (a walking heart attack waiting to happen, according to my Cardiologist) – to an Ironman triathlete today. A change that required deep mental resilience and a lot of coaching and guidance through the inevitable ups-and-downs.

Yet, although 13 million Malaysian adults suffer from chronic disease ailments and really need help to make healthy lifestyle changes (because drugs are much less effective than healthy eating, exercise, and stress management – and costlier too) – there are not enough professionals to help them make difficult changes. Doctors and hospitals are not able to provide day-to-day guidance once patients are discharged. Insurers and employers too need solutions to help their policyholders and employers avoid ending up in hospitals with these debilitating illnesses.

Even with this context, Naluri is a very risky venture. We have a long way to go to create awareness and interest in a service to help those at risk become healthier. If someone needs to lose weight, control their blood sugar or cholesterol levels, they are not likely to immediately seek health coaching. Doctors will tell them what they need to do, but over 80% of people struggle on their own, because re-wiring ingrained habits is very, very hard to do by oneself, without professional coaching.

 Moreover, tackling the issue by offering psychological support, coaching, and guidance is very new. It will take a while for people to get comfortable to open up to their coach, and entrust them with their deep-seated anxieties and concerns about their health and lifestyles.

This requires a lot of trust and empathy.

We are building a digital solution to make professional health coaching and psychological support more accessible, more affordable, and more convenient. Simply downloading an app connects any user to our professionals, without needed an appointment or going to see them physically.

 To earn that trust on a digital platform, we need the most reliable tools and systems, without compromise.

Sure, pursuing disruptive innovation requires a lot of risk-taking to push boundaries and challenge conventions. But there are appropriate times to risk it, and there are times, when we play it safe.

WHEN TO RISK IT:

• Product design: You can never truly anticipate how people will respond and use your product features. I’ve found that its best to design crude initial versions and put it out to real users to test it, even when it is full of bugs. Let them break it, and then keep tweaking and refining it.
• Marketing: Some people advocate preparing meticulously detailed plans that identify target segments, tailor messaging and carefully select the right media. In today’s fast moving age of digital marketing, I’ve had many experiences where the main customers that used our products were not from our planned segments or distribution channels. We now do a lot of experimentation and then refine our marketing resources once we collect data on what segments are responding to which types of the different creative ads that we put out.
• Hiring: Yes, I think this is worth taking big risks. Following conventional hiring evaluation criteria can cause us to miss out on talented people who come from non-traditional backgrounds. If they end up not being a fit, it is easier to part company after a few months, than risk out on missing a superstar. In other words, it’s better to have more false positives than false negatives.

WHEN TO PLAY IT SAFE:

• Regulations: Even when regulatory landscapes are unclear, we prefer to engage regulators proactively instead of flying under the radar and “hoping” not to be found out. At iflix, we engaged the media regulators in Malaysia right at the start, and even when we expanded in Vietnam, to become the first foreign digital media platform licensed and recognized by the Government.
• Data Security: In today’s climate, any business dealing with customer data cannot afford to risk data breaches as a tarnished reputation can be virtually impossible to recover from. For this reason, securing my device – and the data and identities tied to them – is a major imperative. That’s why upfront, my Naluri team now invests in using top-of-the-line cloud services that are HIPAA-compliant, and I rely heavily on the HP Elitebook x360, the world’s most secure and manageable PCs, for its unparalleled multi-layered security features.

You can learn more about the HP Elitebook x360’s security solutions here.

• Legal agreements: I hate having to go through legal agreements, but I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to deal with messy problems when we didn’t have clear documents – from how we incorporate our company, agreements with business partners and suppliers, and even agreements with freelancers. Investing to get proper legal advice is well worth it.

 I’m still learning and pushing the boundaries with my new health-tech start-up, Naluri and the start-ups that I have invested in and continue to advise. I hope to share more as I learn what works and what doesn’t.

Please share your experiences too!