GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The 12 steps to biomedical innovation starts with being a problem seeker, not a problem solver. Eventually, to be successful, customer problems and solutions need to meld around a VAST business model i.e. one that is not just profitable, but that demonstrates:

1. Validity Regardless or which elements of your model you choose, they have to be valid. In other words, the dogs have to eat the food. When the dog won’t eat the food, you’ll have to change your approach and try again.

2. Automaticity At the very start of planning your venture, you should think about how you are going to work on your business, not in it. Reducing hands on time to manage operations will give you more time to lead the company and create strategies for growth and give you more personal time to enjoy the fruits of your success. Outsourcing, automating or using technologies to ramp up operations, sourcing and distribution is a key part of scaling, and something that investors want to see…which brings us to the next piece.

3. Scalability Your business model is primarily a way to create a business machine that can produce an infinite number of products. Think of it as a device that takes in customers and creates profits out the other end and can do so at quicker and quicker speeds.

4. Time and Traction Finally, your model need to create as much profit as quickly as possible with a growing customer base that is loyal to your brand.

Many doctors, scientists and engineers start with solutions looking for a problem. Some find it or, eventually, as their inventions or technology evolves, markets appear to those who have the talent to see them. The more typical model, and one that is more common among the startup community, is to find a problem and devise a solution.

But, how do you pick the IDEAL opportunity given the almost infinite possibilities? Here are some tips:

I Identify the problem: Seeing a problem is an important skill and core competency of savvy entrepreneurs. It typically is the result of personal experience, primary research talking or watching others or secondary research. Whichever problem you pick, look for ones that:

1. Will make a very big difference in people’s lives if you solve it
2. Has the potential to be very profitable or create lots of user defined value, typically at least 10x the value compared to existing offerings or the status quo.
3. Is something that taps into your passion or satisfies your psychic need
4. Anticipates future customer/stakeholder wants and needs
5. Has an extremely high level of market pain and frustration, where customers know they have a problem and have unsuccessfully and repeatedly tried to solve it
6. Has limited barriers to entry
7. Has the right potential risk-return profile that matches yours
8. Is not one dominated by incumbents
9. Is easy to explain and understand
10. Someone is willing to pay enough for your solution so that you can make it profitably

Where massive success comes – where a good idea becomes great – is when it meets five simple criteria:

1. It is the first solution to a problem or gap (it is “innovative”)
2. It is the first WORKING solution to a problem or gap (it is “innovative and effective”)
3. It is the most affordable, comparable, option for its market (it is “innovative, effective and affordable”)
4. It consistently examines its effectiveness and seeks to improve (it is “innovative, effective, affordableand adaptive”)
5. It is powerful enough to create a loyal following that naturally wants to – and does – share the idea with others (it is “innovative, effective, affordable, adaptive and influential”)

How do you find problems worth solving?

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

There are three basic ways to establish or TEE up a competitive advantage: Technological excellence, Execution/operational excellence and customer Experience excellence e.g speed, convenience, service and high touch. You must dominate on one, but be equally competitive on the others. Here is how to measure them.

While policy makers are pushing value based care, convenience care is more important to patients. In addition, the poor doctor experience is causing burnout and career dissatisfaction. Sick care delivery is presently organized for the convenience of the doctor, not the patient. Changing that model by “democratizing” care or consumerizing it causes workflow disruption and resistance.

Consequently, many sick care entrepreneurs are trying to improve the doctor and patient experience. Several companies are using AI and machine learning to do so using apps and mobile platforms, voice to text technologies and products designed to work around the lack of EMR interoperability. However, whether successful improvements in patient and doctor experience translates into higher value, i.e. quality per unit cost or significant reductions in waste and unnecessary patient visits, is difficult to measure.

Examples include doc-on-demand (Healthtap), patient reported outcomes (Cliexa), distributed care coordination documentation (mCHarts) and symptom checker (WebMD)

Hospitals with high patient experience scores performed better on a number of clinical quality measures, further evidence that such efforts provide a clinical return on investment. Demonstrate a correlation does not mean causation, though.

Researchers at Deloitte compared patient experience scores from Hospital Compare to quality measures that looked at both the point of care and outcomes, including emergency department wait times, readmission and mortality rates and hospital acquired infection rates.

They found that hospitals with “excellent” ratings (a 9 or 10 out of 10) for patient experience performed better on many of the 18 included clinical quality measures when compared to those with “low” (a zero to 6 out of 10) scores for experience.

However, several studies have failed to correlate patient satisfaction scores with quality scores.

The challenge, then, is to translate data to experience to measurable value. Here are some of the problems and challenges with data, data everywhere. Here are some solutions.

In order to reduce spending, the Institute of Medicine suggested attaching incentive payments to high patient satisfaction scores, ideally driving providers to deliver high quality healthcare. The Affordable Care Act also established a provision for value-based purchasing, which created a set of quality measures that included patient satisfaction scores.

But those scores have been ineffective in actually improving quality healthcare, these authors said, influencing the way physicians deliver treatment potentially for the worse. In an attempt to avoid penalizations for low patient satisfaction scores, many physicians alter their practice in ways that don’t improve patient wellness and outcomes.

Doctors are increasingly being disintermediated in every phase of care, including DIY initial diagnosis, clinical decision support and computer vision assisted diagnosis, treatment, and post treatment follow up and chronic disease management.

AIntrepreneurs should keep their I’s on the prize and demonstrate D2E2V (data to experience to value). The Apple Watch detecting atrial fibrillation is already getting push back from cardiologists overwhelmed by messages in their inbox. Thirty teams are advancing in IBM Watson’s international AI competition, with healthcare startups making up more than half of the top 10 finalists.

Digitizing the patient and doctor experience and translating it into value requires changing your business model, not your technology. In sick care, that will require changing some rules since rules drive ecosystems that create business models that drive or inhibit innovation.Primary care physicians, for example, do not routinely put patient-reported symptoms regarding sleep, pain, anxiety, depression and low energy or fatigue into electronic health record systems. At the same time simply putting patient symptoms—which often go unrecognized and undertreated by busy clinicians—into the EHR won’t address the problem by itself. The key is making the information actionable in the context of a primary care physician visit.

Anything short of delivering multiples of value that does not disrupt workflow or improves workflow is technoinnovation hype and theater that misses the mark, and, quite conceivably, adds cost and workflow disruption that makes the doctor and patient experience worse, not better and has little, if any, favorable impact on quality or cost.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

In defining primary care, it is necessary to describe the nature of services provided to patients, as well as to identify who are the primary care providers. The domain of primary care includes the primary care physician, other physicians who include some primary care services in their practices, and some non-physician providers. However, central to the concept of primary care is the patient. Therefore, such definitions are incomplete without including a description of the primary care practice. Here are some definitions concerning the different parts of primary care.

Digital medicine, the use of information and communications (ICT) technologies to exchange medical information, is being promoted as the salvation of our sick, sick care system. Here are some takeaways from a recent conference, for example:

• Key Takeaways
• Creating a digital medicine toolkit becomes more relevant as we transition away from fee-for-service and into value based reimbursement.
• But it is very important to note that in healthcare the biggest ROI for any investment is to invest in primary care. Tools to assist, complement, and support the primary care physicians can potentially of most value.
• High priority items to invest in – telemedicine, data analytics, behavioral health.
• Incentive structures from payers or employers are necessary components to the success of a digital intervention

Consequently, primary care is changing in response to many factors, including consumerization and the hightened patient and care community service, cost and quality expectations.

With all this change, as always, comes opportunities for primary care entrepreneurs interested in creating multiples of user defined value through the deployment of innovation.

1. Digital health development, dissemination and implementation
2. Office based clinical research using digital tools
3. Edupreneurship opportunities
4. Business model innovation
5. Patient experience innovation
6. Doctor experience innovation
7. Working with patient entrepreneurs and prosumers
8. Non-clinical physician entrepreneurship career opportunities
9. Care coordination tools
10. Participation in early stage drug, device, digital health and care delivery product design and development
11. Intrapreneurial leadership as an employed physician or health professional
12. Social entrepreneurship
13. Physician investing
14. Mentoring
15. Transforming medical education
16. Interprofessional entrepreneurship
17. Building community based biomedical and clinical innovation networks
18. Encouraging medical societies to offer biomedical entrepreneurship education and training
19. Building and participating in accelerators, scalerators and other regional innovation ecosystems
20. Expanding your internal and external networks.

While the opportunities are great, so are the barriers to physician entrepreneurship. Here are some ways to overcome them. Here are some ways to get started.

There are three basic ways for primary care docs to innovate their way out of the mess we’ve caused: technology, execution and customer/patient experience.

Physician entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of uncertainty with the goal of creating multples of user defined value throught he development, deployment and dissemination of biomedical and clinical innovation. As you can see, their are many ways to do that other than creating your own company.

Primary care is under stress and needs to be unbundled. It is getting harder to save private practice. The only way to transform it is to embrace an entrepreneurial mindset and follow the rules of Othercare. Or, you can just fake it ’till you make it.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The 2016 election revealed a dramatic gap between two Americas—one based in large, diverse, thriving metropolitan regions; the other found in more homogeneous small towns and rural areas struggling under the weight of economic stagnation and social decline. Amazon choosing NY and Washington to build headquarters is an example.

Economic development experts agree that regional economic development depends on creating ecosystems that support entrepreneurs and new value creation. However, the assets, culture and needs of one community differs substantially from the next, particularly those smaller sized or rural communities that face demographic, infrastructure, capital formation and housings challenges unlike those in major metropolitan areas.

Some experts point to 4 foundations of a thriving technology based innovation ecosystem, like Austin, Denver-Boulder and Silicon Valley:

1. Well funded basic research at universities and government labs
2. Local assets, like outdoor recreation, quality of life and amenities
3. Leadership from the ground up
4. Infrastructure

A recent review suggests some approaches to building mid-tier entrepreneurial ecosystems:

1. Favor incumbents less. Policies and regulations that favor incumbents—existing, dominant companies—create barriers to entry by new firms and restrict competition.
2.  Listen to entrepreneurs. Rather than develop policies abstractly intended to correct “market failures,” policymakers should engage local entrepreneurs in person to develop and implement practically focused policies intended to encourage dynamism, increase diversity, and stimulate “metabolic” activity such as idea exploration, product development, and increased rates of deal flow. •
3. Map the ecosystem. Create an inventory or graph that indicates who the participants in the ecosystem are and how they are connected. More ambitiously, map roles and differentiate relationships by type, direction, and magnitude of interaction. Once validated by the entrepreneurs and community members, ecosystem maps can become valuable tools in developing strategies for engagement. •
4. Think big, start small, move fast. This simple rule, which applies to entrepreneurial ventures, also holds true for strategies to enable local entrepreneurial ecosystems. To be effective, such strategies should seek domains for early success and rapidly iterate forward
5. Avoid artificially segmenting your community or your strategies. Entrepreneurs and members of entrepreneurial communities are not potted plants: they are active participants in a range of activities, such as creating new compd from there to build well-grounded programs at scale.
6. Prepare to capitalize on crises. Much like a rotting trunk of a fallen tree feeds the growth of new saplings, economic disruption creates entrepreneurial opportunities. Because experiencing disruptions is an inevitable part of economic and social life, those involved in enabling entrepreneurial ecosystems should anticipate them and prepare to make the most of the opportunities they create.

When it comes to creating digital health or clinical innovation ecosystems in rural or smaller regions, I would add using local assets that are more nimble to:

7. Create digital health human subject trial infrastructure

8. Take advantage of remote patient monitoring, sensing and patient reported outcomes measurement information systems to overcomes geographic boundaries and geographic barriers

9. Integrate as a spoke to larger sized innovation hubs using information and communications technologies

10. Create ways to simplify the process of testing and piloting digital health solutions in smaller sized hospitals. using them as experimental laboratories for larger hospital, mother ship integrated systems

11. Create Collaborative Open Innovation Networks

12. Expand education programs at community colleges and universities serving the community offering nano and online coursed and degrees. Rethink higher ed now that the differential between the costs and benefits of a bachelor’s degree is narrowing and many colleges are not meeting enrollment targets.

13. Create knowledge exchange programs with the closest innovation hub

14. Avoid the 6 dysfunctions of engaged communities

15. Mix the creative class with the technical class including interface industries like aerospace, energy, IT technologies, photonics, media and communications and outdoor recreation.

16. Define entrepreneurship as something other than creating a business

17. Create and empower patient entrepreneurs

18. Offer fellowships to physician entrepreneurs in residence

19. Win the war for talent, particularly for those working in the gig economy

20. Maximize information rheology i.e the flow of information

Here’s a short checklist to measure the health of your cluster:

1. The extensiveness of your internal and external networks and the flow and pressure of information through them.

2. Churn. How many companies are being created and then new ones procreated by the founders?

3. Value creation at the level of the patient, enterprise, regional economy and national competitiveness.

4. Educational program graduates and short and long term contributions.

5. The participants in the cluster and gaps that need to be filled.

6. The regulatory, IP and business environment that facilitiates or interferes with innovation.

7. The level of integration with decentralized, participatory , community based innovation networks

8. Seed stage funding levels and incentives

9. Risk tolerance and the pervasiveness of an entrepreneurial mindset.

10. Tolerance for failure.

Here is how Georgia is building statewide innovation centers and connecting them.

Another prescription to close the rural-urban divide has these active ingredients:

• Boost the digital skills of left behind places. The workers, industries, and places that possess strong digital skills have enjoyed distinct economic rewards. To push back against this winner-take-all dynamic of today’s tech economy, every region’s workforce should be prepared to participate in the digital economy.
• Ensure businesses in lagging regions have access to capital. The pullback in small business lending following the financial crisis has hit less densely populated parts of the country
• particularly hard. Efforts to improve data on small business performance can help banks lower the transaction costs of extending small loans while innovations in financial technology can help create a secondary market for them and reduce risk. Boosting alternative, non-bank sources of capital, such as venture capital funding, can also help support regional economic growth.
• Reduce gaps in broadband. Large gaps in broadband service and subscriptions have put businesses and workers in less densely populated areas at a huge disadvantage. Policy proposals should focus on connecting more people and encouraging greater subscription rates in places already endowed with broadband.
• Identify “growth poles” that can support regional growth. While it may be inefficient to “save” every left-behind small city or rural community in the U.S., targeted federal policy aimed at strengthening 10 or so promising mid-sized centers of advanced industry activity would bring more growth to some communities adjacent to many more lagging towns and rural areas. Federal investment in these “
• growth poles” will put more communities on a path toward self-sustaining economic growth.
• Help Americans move to opportunity. The federal government should expand the availability of financial support for individuals who want to make
• long-distance moves to places promising greater economic opportunity. At the same time, federal policy should encourage states and localities to relax zoning restrictions and construct new housing units to increase the supply of affordable housing. For those who wish to stay in their communities to live but not necessarily to work, state and local governments could provide a subsidy for workers commuting to adjacent communities.

Communities should strive to be part of the BIG FIX, moving sick care to health care. It will take rethinking community level education, sick care process re-engineering, community engagement and building entrepreneurial ecosystems.

If you find that there are opportunities for improvement, then try using some of the strategies to fill the gaps and reap the rewards, no matter where you live.

Image credit: Tehran Times

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

In my role as the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE), I sometimes receive inquiries like this: “Hi, Dr. Meyers. I was reading some of your posts on the SoPE website and social media, and was wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking time to read the enclosed business plan for an idea I have and whether you could give me some advice on where to find investors.” In most instances, the information that I receive is not investor-ready and typically contains the following errors written by biomedical and health entrepreneurs trying to commercialize an idea, invention or discovery. They are:

1. People describe ideas that have not been reduced to practice. There is a big difference between an idea, an invention and an innovation. An idea is something that pops into your mind and stays there. It is a prisoner, never to escape or otherwise see the light of day, let alone a customer. An invention, on the other hand, is an idea reduced to practice. It can be sketched on the back of a napkin, a prototype made of Styrofoam and duct tape or a YouTube video describing your digital health product. An innovation has both a qualitative and quantitative component. It is a new way of doing something, possibly using old things in a new way that result in at least ten times the value of existing competitive offerings. Anything short of that is an improvement or, worse case, a solution looking for a problem.

2. They are not clear whether they have a technology, a product or a business. A product is something customers will buy that solves their problem. A start-up is an entity looking for a scalable and profitable business model. Like a child is not a small adult, a start-up is not a smaller version of an ongoing business.

3. They ask for money to make a product or do research. Investors give money to make money as soon and as risk-free as possible. They are not interested in giving you money to do research, pay your salary or buy an office. They want you to use their money to validate a business model that can be scaled to create profits as quickly as possible. They don’t support science projects.

4. They do not have a business, let alone a business model. A for-profit business is an organizational entity designed to offer products at a profit. The business model describes how the business will create, deploy and harvest value. Several businesses sell one or a few products; however, there are not many. Most have to expand their product lines eventually, capture new markets and adapt to change to sustain their growth.

5. Most don’t have a validated business model, i.e., early adopters or customers. Technological products require not just technical validation (Will it work the way it should and the way customers want it to?), but clinical validation (Will it do what we say it will do and be safe?) and ultimately commercial validation (Will the dog eat the food?).

6. Their proposal is not investor ready. Less than 0.5 percent of venture pitches will get funded because the presentation is not formatted correctly, the information is not appropriate or focuses on the wrong things, the opportunity is not big enough or profitable enough or, quite simply, what is being proposed is not technically feasible, believable or based upon valid marketing and revenue assumptions.

7. They spend 80 percent of the time talking (usually in arcane language with lots of jargon) about their solution, 15 percent of the time talking about themselves and five percent talking about the problem to be solved or the job to be done. Most doctors, engineers and scientists are preoccupied with their solution. Investors are interested in the market pain, how big it is and how much the market is likely to grow if you fill the product/market gap. In short, at this stage, you need to be a problem seeker, not a problem solver.

8. They don’t listen. If you listen long enough, patients will tell you their diagnosis. The same is true for customers. They will describe or demonstrate their pain and ask you for a solution. Don’t miss the diagnosis by listening to their chief complaint.

9. They insist they are right and are usually looking for validation of their ideas. What you think is valuable is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what the customer values, and they vote with their wallets.

10. They have poor interpersonal, communication and selling skills. Investors bet on the jockey, not the horse. Act like you’ve been in the end zone before.

Here are 10 more turn-offs.

Before you ask for money, be sure you have:

1. A product

2. A patent

3. A team

4. A customer

5. A validated plan

6. A website

7. A story

8. A company

9. An executive summary

10. An exit strategy

Here are 50 questions angel investors will ask you when you make your pitch. Be sure you are ready to answer them. Also, you should do these things before announcing your fundraising round.

The information that potential investors will be answered by these questions:

• Who are you and your team and why should investors have confidence that you will succeed?
• What problem are you solving and how significant is the problem to all the stakeholders? (Use market data to develop a market model and illustrations showing the opportunity.)
• What is your solution to the problem and how will you sell it? (Describe the user experience and bring a prototype.)
• What are your clinical, regulatory, economic value and reimbursement pathway plans, if applicable?
• How is your approach creative or original vs. competition and how will it be protected by intellectual property?
• How will you grow the venture and value vs competition over the long term?
• What is your exit strategy?
• What funding are you seeking?

The bottom line IS the bottom line. For investors, and for your sake and the people you hire, you need to answer three basic questions about revenue and profit:

1. How? HINT: By creating the right product-market mix
2. How much? HINT: By sizing the market
3. How soon? HINT: By creating a high revenue, low cost business model canvas and scaling it

Do me a favor, please. Before you send your idea to someone for input, be sure you’ve done your homework and have a proposal that is ready for prime time. Focus on the problem, not the solution. Create a business model that you can test and then validate. Don’t ask for money too soon. Practice your communication skills in order to tell your story in as short a period of time as possible, using language that a sixth grader could understand. (The Wall Street Journal uses language at a sixth grade reading level.)

Finding startup money is painful. So, take these pain relievers and use your patient portal to send me an mail in the morning.

If you can’t, then kill the idea, save us both time and move on to the next. Good luck with your new venture.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Creating corporate innovation is never easy and takes several steps. Carlson and Wilmot mention five disciplines:

Important Needs: Work on important customer and market needs, not just what is interesting to you.

Value Creation: Use the tools of value creation to create customer value fast.

Innovation Champions: Be an innovation champion to drive the value-creation process.

Innovation Teams: Use a multidisciplinary, team-based approach to innovation to create a collective, genius-level IQ.

Organizational Alignment: Get your team and enterprise aligned to systematically produce high-value innovations

Identifying innovation champions within your organization is not always easy. Appealing to self interest is one tip and there are many more. However, when it comes to identifying internal champions from the outside in, it is even harder to penetrate the internal firewalls. For example, suppose you have a digital health product that you want to develop and test with a hospital or physician provider? How and where do you find those people interested in innovating who are earlyvangelists and adoptors?

What are early adoptors?

Here are some ways to find them:

1. Create a free to the customer model so they don’t have to pay for it

2.Make it painless. Be sure to make your product as easy to buy and use as possible so that you do most of the work and they client gets most of the value.

3. Find an internal mole, connector, maven, salesperson or doer who knows the landmines and knows how to remove the gatekeepers.

4. Be sure you know your potential target pain, who it affects and how your solution aligns with their strategy.

5. Find a third party advocate or ex-employees who can provide you with the necessary support and business intelligence.

6. Ask the grunts in the trenches . They know the leaders, who does what and who can get things done.

7. Contact those with a track record. While past accomplishes are no guarantee of future accomplishments, nor, as they say, if you want to get something done talk to someone who is busy always work, at least it will give you some warm leads. If they say no, ask “Who else should I talk to?”. Doers know other doers.

8.Social media tracking is a great place to listen. Most use it to shout.

9. Find disproportionate pain points and who has the most to gain from treating them.

10. Go big or go home. Focus on big market opportunities, or particularly painful problems for a hospital ,not tinkering. Here is the case for improvement, not innovation.

11. Bring money to the table to help offset the costs of a pilot

12. Be sure you don’t expect too much from your provider development partner

13. Don’t disrupt existing workflow or systems to implement or test the product

14. Have a legacy EMR integration plan or find a third party who can help you do it

15. Come to the table with an experienced team that can execute your pilot project plan on time and under budget.

16. Be willing to engage in revenue or equity sharing if warranted from the results of your pilot.

17. Contact the increasing numbers of hospital innovation centers

18. Join your local innovation ecosystem

19. Join the AMA physicians innovation network or the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs and chapter meetings.

20. Be sure you are able to comply with legacy EMR, WiFi and security requirements

Finally, another factor in finding champions from outside in is to tell your story and create enough buzz so they can find you. Once you have found your champion, here are some ways to sell to doctors and small medical practices.

Innovation champions are :

• Builders
• Passionate, committed and curious
• From all disciplines
• Synthesizers
• Team and partnership creators
• Helpers who seek help from others
• Organizationally responsible

Crashing the gates is getting harder. Value added committees are piling on the paperwork. More and more digital health entrepreneurs are knocking on the doors. Health IT security risk has substantially increased. In addition, with so many hospital systems creating innovation centers, ideas are being funneled to Chief Innovation Gatekeepers.

Finding an internal clinical champion starts with understanding what role you’re looking the clinical champion to play. It’s comes down to one or a combination one of the 7 M’s:

1. Money is I want you to find rich doctors who will invest in my product, or angel networks or high net worth individuals.
2. Marketing is I want you to eliminate the gatekeepers, connect me to your network and get me through the door.
3. Making Something is I want you help me develop this product based on your domain expertise.
4. Management is I want you to be a member of my company board of advisors, directors or officers. I want you to provide management expertise based on what I’ve read about you.
5. Manpower is I need data scientist who can help me solve a technical problem, and you have academic resources or students who can help.
6. Monitoring the Environment is you have a big network and a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in healthcare. I want you to keep abreast of trends. You are my eyes and ears and help me do a SWAT analysis.
7. Maturity is the clinical and business judgment derived from years of experience. While difficult to measure, instincts and that gut feeling are invaluable if they contribute to preventing the wrong move or step.

Here are some additional points to consider when looking to develop a relationship with an internal team?

As a validator, advocate or partner?

• next critical success factor
• comfort level of champion
• abilities of champion
• regulatory and ethical issues
• conflict of interest

What training should they have?

• connections
• reputation and credibility
• ability to execute, align and engage
• strategic thinking

At what point should a physician be brought in?

• As part of the initial advisory board , BoD or management team

Should they only reach out to physicians they know?

• big internal and external networks

Do they need to be using the solution?

• Depends on their role

What kind of content do they need?

• depends on stage of engagement

How do you measure success?

• inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes

How do you compensate them?

• cash/equity

Finding internal champions is a black art. It takes intelligence and the right strategy and tactics to find your champions. Realize that like every other customer, they buy emotionally and justify rationally. You are unlikely to find most of them in the C-suite, so stop wasting your time on Linkedin and coffee shops barking up the wrong trees.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The matchmaker business model, connecting one party interested in connecting with another party, whether it be with romantic or business intent or building a community of interest, is common.

Now that doctors and startups are interested in working with each other or doctors are interested in finding clients for their side gigs, the dating docs models are expanding. Like all dating services, however, their value depends on matching the right person with a problem with the right person who can provide a solution. Getting to yes presents some barriers:

1. Few doctors have an entrepreneurial mindset
2. Doctors interested in working with startups don’t have the business knowledge, skills, abilities or compentencies to add value
3. Expectations are not clear between the two parties. Sorry but you won’t be making as much as a practicing orthopod if you become an advisor to a startup.
4. The only qualifier for doctors to be on the platforms seems to be the letters after their names. Many of those smiling faces on the website are just hood ornaments.
5. There is a disconnect between techies and docs, particularly for non-sick care entrepreneurs
6. One or both sides of the dyad don’t honor their commitments or have the same sense of urgency or aligned incentives to deliver results
7. One or both don’t have a clear job preview and don’t understand the startup world and challenges
8. There are differences between what’s needed in a startup v a scale up v a mature company
9. Administrative hospital chief medical officers are different from startup or corporate CMOs
10. There is no CMO school,,,yet
11. Doctors won’t learn bioentrepreneurship in their formal training, so most of it will be expensive and risky on the job training. We need more entrepreneurial medical schoolsand demonstrating competencies in the business of medicine should be a 7th ACGME competency.
12. Expect to be ghosted and learn to deal with how it makes you feel or what to do when your white coat gets the pink slip

Connecting people is but the first step. Connecting the right entrepreneur or investor with the right doctor will require doing a much better job of educating , screening and vetting the interested parties. Then, and only, then, should you ask for a coffee date, or , if you are really adventurous, dinner. But, be sure you agree on who will pick up the tab in advance and never have your first date pick you up where you live.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Sick care is in trouble. Many argue that we need to go big or go home claiming that we should stop tweaking the system of systems and, instead, make the existing model obsolete.

However, the Moon shot mentality has many downsides. High risk high return ventures often fail, creating a lot of collateral damage.

70-20-10 is a formula that describes how someone learns to do their job. In a twist, the 70/20/10 rule states that organizations should spend 70% of their time on the now, 20% on the next and 10% on the new. There are three horizons of action that the Creator archetype can take to capture growth. NOW initiatives find growth through new niches within categories, segments, and markets. NEW actions focus on developing new products and services. NEXT initiatives capture organic growth from new business models.

Innovation has both a qualitative and quantitative component. Where you decide to play on the novelty-value matrix is an important strategic decision with differing risks and benefits along the spectrum. One is being labeled a “disruptive physician” and suffering the consequences.

Harvard Professor, Michael Porter, claimed that “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”. It follows, then, that when it comes to initiatives, you need to be careful what you ask for.

Here are some reasons why incremental improvements might be a better way to fix things than “disruption”:

1. It’s easier to test and kill the ones that aren’t working particularly if you use design thinking and lean startup customer discovery and hypothesis testing techniques.
2. They are less risky and the cost of failure is less
3. It reduces change , innovation and technofatigue
4. In the highly regulated sick care industry, it is easier to ask for permission than forgiveness
5. It minimizes the distraction of traction
6. It reduces burnout
7. It forces you to more clearly define the problem, resources and stakeholder support required to be successful
8. If forces you to prune and to sunset zombie projects that are not adding user defined value
9. It extends your thinking beyond just new products to include experience and models as well
10. If forces you to ask the right questions before you add another ornament to the tree.

The reality is that most innovation is incremental and evolutionary, building on smaller improvements. Once in a while, there is a giant leap, punctuating the path of progress. The challenge is deciding where and how you want to travel on that road and which exit to take.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Dear Innovator,

On behalf of the staff at Innovation Resorts, welcome. We hope you enjoy your stay and please do not hesitate to contact us via our app if you need anything. Our model is a cross between Canyon Ranch and Techstars and our mission is to help you get your ideas to customers in a supportive and healthy environment. Thinks of us as chicken soup for founders.

Allow me to acquaint you with our activities to make your stay as productive and enjoyable as possible:

Unlimited high speed WIFI any where on campus from 8am -7pm. We have intentionally limited access to allow you to decompress and take advantage of the down time to refresh and activate your dormant creativity

Diet, exercise and relaxation sessions each morning from 6am-8am. Don’t even think of checking your cell phone for messages during this time and please obey the cell free zone signs.

Daily sessions with your executive coach and therapist. Please use our app to schedule sessions each day to assess and monitor your progress

Unlimited use of our Innovation Labs to develop your product and business model ideas with our leadership and business development coaches

Friday night idea orgies where your idea can have sex with someone else’s idea

Admission to our Inovators Club where you will have access to mentors, our dating app to connect to other innovation stakeholders and in kind services from our sponsor.

Please note that our life guards are angel investors, private equity professionals and family office representatives. Since these folks are so hard to indentify in the real world, we have made it easy to identify them. They are wearing green shirts with a dollar sign on their back. Seed stage and angel investors are at the deep end. Series A and institutional investors are at the more shallow end. There is a rescue fee included in your daily charge.

Free admission to our Innovation Monopoly simulation competition. The winners get an all expense paid trip to another Innovation Resort scaleup location of your choice

Come to our daily Meet Your Customer sessions where you can do customer discover interviews to test your business model canvas hypotheses

Registration in our Office Cube of the Future competition.

Our on site infirmary should you need some relief from startup funding pain.

A full spouse program . Contact our concierge desk at x3564 for details and reservation

A personal crying room for the length of your stay.

Once again, welcome to Innovation Resorts. Good Luck with your venture.

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers