Leave it to the guys at Wired to take Clay Christensen’s intellectual theory and fling it over into a pop-culture game, using it to point out a bunch of wild, exciting ideas. I love it, and I’m sure Clay does as well.

Wired 13.05: First Aid for Health Care by Bruce Sterling

In [Clayton M. Christensen’s] latest [book], Seeing What’s Next, the author encourages readers to spot vulnerabilities in the processes, values, and markets of seemingly invulnerable industries.

Intrigued by this challenge, I searched for the stupidest, most dysfunctional US industry I could find. The automotive and energy industries – beset by entrenched interests, sclerotic management, and stifling oversight – were tempting. But the worst has to be health care. Health care has every quality Christensen lists as dangerous: crippling regulation, overcharged customers, enraged victims with deep grudges, unnecessary goods and services, and a massive base of underserved wretches. The remarkably unhealthy US population blows more money on medicine than any other nation in the world, yet gets sicker anyhow.

Could a radically inventive disruption somehow render the whole tangled mess irrelevant? A system that eats 15 percent of the US gross national product is a broad field for disruptions.

Sterling suggest four disruptions to watch:

• Medical tourism
• Alternative medicine
• Independent diagnostic clinics
• Longevity spas.

Read the details!