The redefinition of offering systems in the Healthcare Industry: the role of networking

In recent years, the dominant business models have been deeply influenced by the continuous process of innovation. It has characterized many areas where gaps and latent forces have radically redefined the competitive scenarios. In this economic and social context, companies need to rethink their business models in order to rediscover the strategic variables in order to cope with the extreme complexity of a changing demand. The ability to exploit these new opportunities enables more market-oriented companies to identify new forms of organisation and to build new competitive advantages. The focus is indeed shifting from products with functional dimensions to solutions that integrate tangible and intangible components, mixing the industrial approach with a new service dominant logic (Vargo, Lush, 2004; Gronroos, 2006; Gummesson, 2007). The transition from the product to a "bundle of benefits" highlights the crucial role of intangibles and is related to the changes on the side of the demand. This evolution requires companies to access external resources (Lam 1997), because of the shortage of internal knowledge and skills (Ford et al., 2003). In order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage and to create complex solutions able to meet the new complex customers needs, companies have to develop relationships with players who do not only belong to the same sector, but that also operate in heterogeneous contexts with different competences and capabilities. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of new offering systems based on shared resources and combined competences, considering that resources and competences belong to different actors. In this perspective, our attention is focused on networking, considered as a process of action and re-action among different actors to share resources and to combine competences. In particular, we investigate the Healthcare industry, where companies are forced to adopt a proactive approach in order to redefine the business they operate in and to innovate their business models and organisational structures. In this perspective networking seems to play an enabling role in combining competences and develop value propositions that are more suitable to the evolution of the demand. In this paper, we present two case studies consisting of projects developed in the new “Hybrid” sectors of Telemedicine-Telehealth, in which tele-services are generated by the process of convergence among Medicine, Computer Science, and Telecommunications (Nora and Minc, 1978). We empirically investigated the networks of relationships among the main actors involved in the projects, analysing the resources generated by their interactions.