Disruptive customer value propositions in the global health and medical tourism industry

Across time, corporate hospitals and pharmaceutical companies in developed nations have come up with their own customer value propositions in the form of expensive business models that made sense for those economies. By and large, these business models could not succeed in the emerging economies given their wealth barriers, resource constraints, harsh infrastructure and semi-skilled or under-skilled medical professionals operating in population-rich rural regions of these economies. Realising the growing importance of alternative customer value propositions (CVPs) that smack of affordable business models, some corporates, both national and international, have started rendering their services or contributing their products in a disruptively affordable manner in these emerging economy markets. This paper makes an earnest attempt to compare and contrast various real-time disruptive innovations that appeal to price-sensitive nay value-sensitive customers from both developing and developed economies. It blends the existing theories such as Porter's framework of generic strategies and few theories of internationalisation with the literature on customer value proposition and makes few caveats to application of these theories with due justification and exemplification. It strives to capture various related managerial, organisational, social, conceptual and policy implications. Limitations of the study are indicated along with directions for future research.