Bhaskar Chakravorti

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 Crisis breeds opportunity, as the history of business shows in spades. The most innovative entrepreneurs know how to turn adversity into competitive advantage.
 Capitalizing on adversity means finding solutions in unlikely places: resources that nobody seems to need, people and partners who don’t fit the usual bill, elegantly small answers to big dilemmas, and multidimensional platforms that transcend narrowly defined products.
 The innovators who succeed as the “new normal” takes root will be those who discover opportunity in the seemingly inopportune. Call them the “new abnormals.”
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</article-ideainbrief>Jonathan Bush saw the opportunity to dramatically change how obstetrics practices function. He and his partner set out to build a medical business whose objective was to incorporate both traditional and holistic care options for mothers-to-be. Their aspirations were grand, and demand for their services rapidly grew. But when reliance on slow-paying insurers strapped the practice for cash, Bush’s vision got tangled in red tape.

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Reprint: R1011H
How do some entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors turn adverse conditions to competitive advantage? Chakravorti, of McKinsey and Harvard Business School, has identified four areas that the most successful of these people consistently explore.
1. Entrepreneurs reroute resources that become redundant to meet new needs, as Jonathan Bush did at athenahealth. The company is now a leader in internet-based revenue-cycle management tools.
2. They round up unusual suspects and break industry orthodoxy, as Iqbal Quadir did with Grameenphone in Bangladesh.
3. They find small solutions to big problems, as Trey Moore and Cameron Powell did with their AirStrip OB smartphone app for mobile physicians who needed a major advance in wireless health care.
4. They focus on platform, not just product. That&#8217;s how Fred Khosravi and Amar Sawhney broadened the field of surgical applications for Incept&#8217;s hydrogel technology.
The entrepreneurs who survive in the &#8220;new normal&#8221; will be those who find counterintuitive solutions to the bottlenecks, constraints, and other difficulties that adversity engenders. Call them the &#8220;new abnormals.&#8221;

Finding Competitive Advantage in Adversity

Reprint: R1011H How do some entrepreneurs, corporate innovators, and investors turn adverse conditions to competitive advantage? Chakravorti, of McKinsey and Harvard Business School, has identified four areas that the most successful of these people consistently explore. 1. Entrepreneurs reroute resources that become redundant to meet new needs, as Jonathan Bush did at athenahealth. The company is now a leader in internet-based revenue-cycle management tools. 2. They round up unusual suspects and break industry orthodoxy, as Iqbal Quadir did with Grameenphone in Bangladesh. 3. They find small solutions to big problems, as Trey Moore and Cameron Powell did with their AirStrip OB smartphone app for mobile physicians who needed a major advance in wireless health care. 4. They focus on platform, not just product. That’s how Fred Khosravi and Amar Sawhney broadened the field of surgical applications for Incept’s hydrogel technology. The entrepreneurs who survive in the “new normal” will be those who find counterintuitive solutions to the bottlenecks, constraints, and other difficulties that adversity engenders. Call them the “new abnormals.”

Finding Competitive Advantage in Adversity

Summary.

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