2019 Warwick Business School Case Challenge

3 July 2019

This was the first time Edinburgh participated in the challenge and team members worked for approximately eight weeks to prepare. The five-person Edinburgh team brought diverse backgrounds in financial services, consultancy, and IT. The team applied this breadth of experience to research and understand barriers that prevent adoption of digital innovations in different sectors. They began by identifying seven key barriers, including lack of trust in technological solutions and concerns about data quality and protections.

Drawing insights from successful examples from shipping, logistics, and finance sectors, the Edinburgh team ultimately developed a framework with six key strategies that can be used improve adoption and engagement. The team took a stakeholder-centric approach to this analysis and framed its poster and conference presentation around how to change individual and organisational behaviours. Four key elements in Edinburgh’s approach included:

• Understanding and defining customer/patient journey
• Co-creating digital innovations, products, technologies
• Embedding behavioural-change interventions within larger process-flows
• Reinforcing behavioural change through messages that use narratives to change identity or thinking

Nine teams from Edinburgh, Manchester, Warwick, Oxford, Cambridge, and Aston Universities participated in the challenge. Participants brought deep expertise in healthcare, consultancy, and technology. Executives from GE Healthcare, Pfizer, Medellin, Zoegenix, and the NHS acted as judges throughout.

Throughout the two-day event, the Edinburgh team spoke with fellow participants about their approaches and solutions; learned about the state of digital transformation in the healthcare sector; spoke with clinicians and executives about the need for innovation to improve healthcare delivery; considered the requirement to handle data intelligently and ethically; learned about approaches that enable customer-centric solutions development; and networked with fellow participants.

As part of competition, the Edinburgh team participated in briefings on barriers and solutions to encourage increase user adoption and engagement with the GE Wall of Analytics^TM and Operations Centre, a technology to optimise hospital operations and capacity-planning; Mendelian, a web-based tool to improve diagnosis of rare diseases; and Health Harmony, a telemedicine technology that enables better at-home patient care. Additionally, the team took part in a hands-on design thinking workshop on the morning of the second day to practice customer-centric solution development.

The Edinburgh MBA team’s diverse background and cross-sector framework brought a unique perspective to the challenge. The team competed in a poster briefing and a briefing on adoption strategies tailored to the GE Wall of AnalyticsTM. After these first rounds of competition concluded, Edinburgh was selected as one of three finalist teams to present to all participants on the second-day. As part of this presentation, the team was required to develop a fifteen-minute briefing in under an hour discussing adoption approaches. Competition was fierce and, while first- and second-places ultimately went to Manchester teams, Edinburgh was pleased to have been selected as a finalist during this inaugural appearance.

The Edinburgh team is very grateful to Santander for its support during this event. This backing enabled the team to travel to and participate in the challenge. We were proud to represent Edinburgh University and, as the only Scottish University to take part, the broader community.

Edinburgh’s team consisted of Christian Howieson, Paritosh Prasad, Yanfei Chen, Priyansh Jalan, and Ashwani Somashekhar.