What Your Organization Should Be Importing

There are many voices in the U.S. and around the world these days pushing back against global ties of all sorts. But whatever comes of that trend, there's one type of cross-border flow that needs to be strengthened, not walled off. And that's the importing and exporting of expertise and innovation.

The exporting of know-how and innovation has long been a staple of many segments of the U.S. economy. We've been globally peddling our intellectual property and operational expertise in industries ranging from high-tech to finance to manufacturing for many decades. Most of my own career has been dedicated to helping leading U.S. academic medical centers profitably share their ability to improve the quality and safety of healthcare with hospitals and health systems around the world.

I was looking at an article recently that reminded me how important it is for leaders to see this global flow of innovation as a two-way street. We here in the U.S. haven't figured it all out. We're not great at everything, and even in those areas where we excel, there will always be better ways of doing things that will elude us. It only makes sense to look outside our borders to see if someone out there might have some solutions. That turns out to be the case far more often than you might think.

The article that reminded me of the potential for bringing in improvements from other countries — sometimes called “reverse innovation” — happened to be about how the healthcare industry in the Catalonia region of Spain has invested heavily in new ways to cut costs and improve patient outcomes. Institutions there have started to find global markets for their innovations, and it looks to me like the U.S. healthcare industry could learn from there, too.

Health and healthcare are by their nature especially collaborative. Most industries benefit when ideas and advances are flowing vigorously. One role of industry leaders ought to be ensuring that dynamic is optimized and robust. That means not only taking care to preserve the network of innovation pipelines we have now, but expanding them.