We are pleased to share this four-part white paper highlighting the successful methods that healthcare's largest providers use to first identify potentially transformative ideas, and then to scale the resulting innovations across their own systems and the commercial market. The paper, Going Big: How Major Providers Scale Up Their Best Ideas, is authored by Healthspottr's Carleen Hawn and published in collaboration with the California HealthCare Foundation.

Chapter one takes a closer look at Mayo Clinic and the strategy used by Mayo's Office of Business Development in conceiving and executing on Mayo's first-ever retail storefront. Create Your Own Mayo Clinic Experience, opened last August inside the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minn. 

Most instructive to our readers may be the eight-part "Fit Test" that Mayo's team uses to validate the merits of every novel idea they consider. Fewer than one in ten ideas pass the test. It looks like this:

Mayo Clinic's 8-Point Test

1. Does the project align with Mayo's core values?
2. Does it add value to the Mayo brand?
3. Does it leverage core resources and capabilities?
4. Does it provide a competitive advantage?
5. Can Mayo mitigate the risks of failure?
6. Will it deliver good financial returns?
7. Will it deliver good educational returns?
8. Is it scalable?

Subsequent chapters of Going Big will look at the innovation strategies employed by Partners' Center for Connected Health in Boston, Ascension Health of St. Louis, and Bay Area-based Kaiser-Permanente. We hope you enjoy the series and expect you will find other useful lessons in the reading.