"Disruptive innovation often sparks controversy or negative feeling to people who do not understand what the concept means in terms of business. The word carries a negative connotation in the English language, but the signified promises unmitigated blessings in terms of quality, performance, durability and cost for people everywhere." -Christensen

Christensen had his own reasons for picking a negative signifier to identify his theory and life's work, but disruption is fundamentally a positive process. It democratizes technology so that more people can achieve access to new products and services. The new profit engine revolution will arise not through replicating scientific intuition, but by commoditizing understanding through scientific progress. We need to work to democratize science and push it out to the edges and into the hands of the people. This will ultimately hurt profits for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that refuse to adapt their business models as decentralization runs its course, and patients will indeed be healthier and better off. This means that diagnostic procedures, general medicine and drug discovery will be done less and less by people we refer to as "Doctor." This has happened in all types of science and technology based industries before, including medicine. This means that we should not sit by idly as the change occurs, but rather, we should help shape the future by experimenting with new business models designed for today's hyper connected world. The issue really boils down to one of cooperation. We should encourage nurse practitioners to do the jobs that doctors can teach them to do well, and we should encourage low-cost business models for drug discovery and preventative health care. Decentralization is well underway in the pharma industry and it will continue to unfold in a predictable way, mirroring the basic flow of scientific progress and understanding.

Science and technology typically move sequentially through 3 phases:

(Model borrowed from the Innovator's Prescription by Clayton Christensen)

• Intuition

• Pattern recognition

• Precision (Medicine)

Or to frame it another way:

• Trial and Error

• Empirical Studies

• Rules Based Engineering

President Obama recently called for "Precision Medicine." As usual for a politician, he is merely stating something that has already taken shape in science and is moving its way into healthcare with personalized medicine 2.0. It's targeted discovery with a highly valuable genomics/diagnostic component that is emerging. Well, when things move into the realm of precision medicine, there is already a formula for how things are done, and these activities can overwhelmingly be moved into business models with less expensive overhead. Instead of trying fight industrial currents, why not float over into the direction where theory predicts the most flow is heading--out to the edges.*

*Edges - During early discovery, the edge is the scientific frontier, it is the not well understood, the best doctors by intuition in large integrated institutuions and experimenation is most akin to trail and error. Once a field or embedded-process becomes well understood, then entrepreneurs should seek to push these activities out of the integrated business models into simple and focused low-cost solution shops.