As you heard from us at last month’s Digital Transformation & Innovation 2019 Forum, all your innovation investments and efforts should be focused on addressing customer experience needs and challenges. For nearly every industry, a key aspect of this is proactively addressing any health issues or risks your customers face or may encounter in the future.

Customer and employee health are pertinent to all markets; employees need to be healthy to do good work, and customers need to be healthy to consume goods and services. And if there is any risk of employees or customers getting injured while taking advantage of your services, proactively addressing this should be a high priority.

The leading innovators are prioritizing this, even if they’re not currently in the healthcare industry. A good example: Apple CEO Tim Cook asserted his focus on healthcare innovation by saying, “If you zoom out into the future (. . .) and ask the question, ‘What was Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind?’ It will be about health.”

And to deliver these values faster and more responsively to specific customer circumstances and health risks, base your innovation efforts on forward-looking customer insights and leverage emerging technologies such as AI/machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, edge computing, and digital twins. These types of tech-driven innovations extend your company’s current value and tend to disrupt competitive solutions and services.

A good example is last year’s move by retailer Best Buy, which partnered with and then acquired a mobile startup that gives senior citizens fast health insights, treatment reminders, and urgent engagements with their doctors and nurses.

BestBuy's mobile health innovation
Source: Best Buy.com

Another great example driven by the innovation team at Nestlé is an effort it is piloting in Japan to help customers craft a personalized nutrition program via AI that extends the lifespan of our aging populations.

Nestle's Wellness Club
Source: Nestlé

My latest report, coauthored with Senior Analysts Arielle Trzcinski and Jeff Becker and released on June 10, helps you understand how leading innovators are crafting such solutions to improve their clients’ human conditions.

CIOs should read this report to understand how healthcare companies and new players are innovating to improve human conditions while positioning their firms for future market leadership. This report shares a collection of great examples of these types of innovations by Mayo Clinic, Google, and others, as well as recommendations on how to maximize these opportunities.

Please read through this document, and if you’d like further guidance, please engage with Arielle, Jeff, and I by scheduling a Forrester inquiry.