Do Tank partnered with a national healthcare association to design and deliver a large-scale innovation challenge that generated more than 250 early-stage care model concepts — creating a structured pipeline for new approaches to value creation.

By grounding ideation in patient realities and guiding leaders through disciplined problem definition and model design, the initiative produced high-quality concepts ready for further development, while building internal capability to explore and test new business models over time.

The association was seeking new ways to help its members respond to growing pressure on traditional care delivery and payment models. Leaders recognized that incremental improvement would not be sufficient — new approaches to care, coordination, and value creation were needed. However, identifying viable new models posed a challenge. Innovation efforts often defaulted to surface-level ideas, disconnected from real patient needs or operational realities. Without a structured approach, ideation risked generating concepts that were difficult to implement, scale, or sustain. The association needed a way to engage leaders across the system in developing new ideas — while ensuring those ideas were grounded, relevant, and actionable.

Do Tank’s Role:

• Do Tank served as the strategic design and facilitation partner, responsible for structuring the innovation experience and guiding participants from insight to early-stage business model concepts.
• Our role focused on creating the conditions for meaningful innovation — ensuring that participants moved beyond brainstorming toward disciplined exploration of how care models could be redesigned to create value in practice.

The work began by anchoring participants in the lived experience of patients and caregivers. Teams engaged with detailed personas that reflected emotional, social, and system-level realities, using these narratives to surface unmet needs, barriers, and trade-offs embedded within existing care models. Rather than rushing into solutions, participants were guided to slow down and develop a shared understanding of the underlying problems. Teams compared journeys, identified points of friction, and traced challenges back to deeper system drivers — creating clarity on what needed to change before considering how to change it. Once this foundation was established, teams moved into structured ideation. Using design frameworks, participants generated, sketched, and refined new care models, exploring how services could be delivered differently, how workflows could be redesigned, and how value could be created across stakeholders. This approach ensured that ideas were not only creative, but grounded in real needs and aligned with emerging care delivery and business model considerations.

The innovation challenge generated more than 250 ideas, with a subset selected for further development and investment consideration. The quality and relevance of the concepts reflected the depth of insight developed during the earlier phases of the work. Beyond idea generation, the initiative created a repeatable approach for exploring new business models. Participants gained practical experience in human-centered design, structured ideation, and model development — strengthening their ability to lead similar efforts within their own organizations. The association was left with both a pipeline of new concepts and an expanded capacity to support innovation across its membership.

Business model innovation in healthcare does not begin with ideas — it begins with a clear understanding of how value is currently created, where it breaks down, and what patients and providers actually experience. This case reinforces a consistent pattern in our work: when leaders take the time to define problems with precision and shared understanding, the quality of solutions improves significantly.

For organizations exploring new models of care, the question is not simply what ideas to pursue — but how to create the conditions for those ideas to emerge, be tested, and evolve into viable approaches to delivering and sustaining value.