GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

There are many definitions of innovation. In my view, there is a qualitative and quantitative component that helps to determine whether something is innovative as defined by users.

The qualitative component is newness i.e whether someone is new or is old done in a new way. The quantitative component is the multiple of user defined value created when compared to competitive offerings or the status quo. Research indicates that it takes at least a 5x multiple of user defined value to get a customer to switch form one product to the next. I’ve arbitrary set 10x as the metric to define whether something is innovative. So has Google in their 10x rule.

Here’s what the novelty-value matrix looks like?

As you can see, you want to be in the upper right hand corner. The upper left hand corner is for solutions looking for problems that create no substantial value.

Now that you know the definition of innovation, here are 10 things you should know about it.

1. You need to lead innovators, not manage innovation

2. Innovative universities and organizations are not necessarily entrepreneurial

3. Patients and other stakeholders are your main source of opportunity to create innovation.

4. Big Device should change their R/D models

5. You need an Innovation Management System to create impact

6. You need to clarify your innovation expectations and encourge innovators to go beyond them or dial them back. Sometimes tinkering is the first step towards something bigger.

7. Have you validated your business model assumptions?

8. Rules create ecosystems. Ecosystems drive innovative business models. Think, TV, the Internet, electric cars.

9. Stop blowing innovation smoke and raise your innovation bar

10. Create user defined value through the deployment of innovation, not just companies

The difference between creativity, inventiveness, entrepreneurship and innovation also depends on where you land on the continuum. Creatives come up with lost of ideas, however many fail to reduce them to practice (invent), let alone pursue opportunity to create user define value (entrepreneurship) that reaches the 10x hurdle(innovation).

Ideas are different from inventions, improvements and innovations. Be sure you don’t kid yourself and lump them together.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Medical and health entrepreneurship, the pursuit of opportunity with scare resources with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation, is growing quickly. After many years of either ignoring opportunities or being sidelined, physician entrepreneurs are finally throwing their hats in the ring. 

There are two basic categories of medical entrepreneurship-biomedical and clinical. There are significant differences in the innovation pathways for the two:

1. Intellectual property protection usually is of more importance in biomedical entrepreneurship.

2. Regulatory approval can be a long, expensive and risky process for drugs and devices.

3. Reimbursement and payment for biomedical innovations are often dependent on getting the appropriate codes and third party payments at high enough amounts to generate a profit.

4. Business models differ and are constantly changing.

5. The amount of capital necessary to get a drug or device to market is frequently higher than health innovation by several orders of magnitude.

6. The FDA may not have jurisdiction over many health innovations, for example a digital health app that is not deemed to be a medical device but rather something that provides information and education to users.

7. The customers vary depending on whether you are deploying a biomedical or health product.

8. Validating your business model using lean startup methodologies will vary and can be more challenging for biomedical innovators.

9. Biomedical entrepreneurship often requires a different skill set than health entrepreneurship.

10. Biomedical entrepreneurship is riskier.

Health or clinical entrepreneurs focus their activities on digital health, care delivery models, business or clinical processes, or policy. Furthermore, digital health can be further subdivided into segments:

1. Remote sensing and wearables
2. Telemedicine
3. Data analytics and intelligence, predictive modeling
4. Health and wellness behavior modification tools
5. Bioinformatics tools (-omics)
6. Medical social media
7. Digitized health record platforms
8. Patient -physician patient portals
9. DIY diagnostics, compliance and treatments
10. Decision support systems

Unlike bioimedical entrepreneurs who are trying to get drugs, devices, diagnostics,vaccines and biologics to patients, digipreneurs have to face the facts that:

1. There is a difference between an industry and a market. Those companies that provide products and services comprise the industry. The customers who use those products and are looking for ways to get a particular job done are the market. However, both the digital health industry and digital health users are a complex combination of providers, payers, industry partners in interface technology industries and patients, some of whom are customers or consumers while others are influencers.

2. Like all investors, digital health investors are looking for the highest rate of return with the least amount of risk. Given the foggy legal, regulatory and reimbursement atmosphere, it’s too early to tell which dogs will eat the food. There has already been high profile digital health failures, roll ups, IPOs and consolidation as the industry and markets continue to mature.

3. Most digital health technologies have not been clinically validated nor are they required to do so. However, other regulatory agencies, like the FTC or the Consumer Products Safety Commission, are wary about digital health product claims that are not supported by research.

4. The FDA continues to offer periodic guidance documents and regulations that contribute to a level of uncertainty when it comes to defining what is a medical device and what is not. That makes the hair stand up on the back of investor’s necks.

5. Given the multiple stakeholders in healthcare — payers, providers, patients, partners and others — it’s hard to target any one customer. Several need to see the value for any given product or service.

6. The industry is too new and there is too little research to know which customers/ patients/ stakeholders will adopt a product and why.

7. Scale trumps innovation. The single most important characteristic of those companies that have received substantial follow-on investments are those that have scaled their customer rate rapidly by at least 70 percent a year.

8. Doctors don’t have the information they need to know whether to prescribe or use a given digital health technology.

9. Most doctors don’t get paid to use digital health technologies, they disrupt workflow, and there are nagging behavioral and emotional barriers to adoption by both patients and their families and their doctors.

10. There are significant confidentiality, security and data privacy issues still lurking.

11. Patent protection is not as important in digital health as it is in biopharma or medtech. Things move much more quickly, the product life cycles are much shorter and time is of the essence when it comes to getting adaption and penetration in the patient/consumer or medical community.

12. Business models are evolving and change on a regular basis, sensitive to the protean tastes of Internet junkies.

13. Digital health clusters consist of many of the same parts as biomedical and clinical clusters. However, since digital health resides at the interface of information, communications and sick care, there are other elements such as cybersecurity, big data and analytics, blockchain and artificial intelligence as well as other metaclusters.

14. Investors in digital health are different from investors in biomedical technologies and industries

15. Drugs, devices and digital health are converging so, sometimes, there are significant overlaps in product development

Here is a guided tour of the Denver-Boulder startup tech cluster. What’s in your asset map?

For these and other reasons, non-sickcare entrepreneurs fail despite their previous track records of success in other consumer markets.

Here is the story about how many came together to create the Colorado digital health cluster.

Digital health is the new New Thing. Like all new things, it is surrounded by hype and hope. Whether digital health can bend the cost curve and help patients or is just another tech bubble remains to be seen. Digital health entrepreneurs need to do their due diligence with both eyes open and their wallets protected until they are convinced they can overcome the risks.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Each day, more and more things get connected, creating an event bigger and bigger smart world creating more and more data that makes us more and more vulnerable to cyberattacks and intrusions.

Apple has unveiled the Watch Series 4 at its annual event at the Apple Park in San Francisco. The new Apple watch – cleared by the Food and Drug Administration of the USA – will allow users to take an Electrocardiogram or ECG. Apple’s Jeff Williams said that the the Watch can detect irregular heartbeat, low heart rate.

What’s more, men, materials and machines are colliding with AI, analytics, cloud computing, fog computing,blockchain and mobile technologies increasing the levels of compexity as the cyber nervous system evolves.

Here is the basic science course on remote sensing. Here is what you need to know about the embryology.

The IoT World Forum Reference Model describes the layers in IoT system

There are four primary areas of IoT impact:

1. Enhanced business insights
2. Operational efficiencies
3. New revenue streams
4. Improved processes

The consequence is that the internet of medical things (IoMT) creates big challenges and opportunities to cut costs, improve outcomes and the doctor and patient experience. Here are some themes emerging:

1.Collisions of men, machines and materials impacting business models

2. Workforce development challenges to deliver a diverse IoMT competent talent pipeline

3. Cybersecurity challenges

4. AI and machine learning integration

5. Creating and protecting the appropriate networking infrastructure

6. Using the IoMT to solve immediate problems v informing future products and service development

7. The battle for 5G deployment

8. International business competitive issues

9. The migration of product companies into XaaS companies

10. The changing role of CIOs and CSIOs

11. Navigating the data development roadmap

12. Using the IoMT to transform sick care to healthcare by moving from reporting to prescribing to predicting to preventing

13. Deciding which data need to go to the cloud or can remain closer to the ground, in the fog

14. How to make poor data into usable data so you don’t get GIGO

15. How to change dumb assets in to smart assets by converting data to value

16. How to dismantle data silos and minimize adverse outcomes to other stakeholders

17. What happens when the patient owns the data?

18. How do we create a standard interoperable platform for the IoMT?

19. How to remove the barriers to dissemination and implementation of the IoMT?

20. When does remote sensing move from being constructive to being creepy?

21. How leaders can move from fashionistas (buying the latest shiny new object and then moving on) to champions (thoughtful deployment and scaling)?

22. How to use the IoMT as part of the complex process of changing doctor and patient behavior?

23. Navigating from thinking big to starting small to scaling fast with a minimal cost of failure

24. Learning from industries outside of sick care, since sick care can’t be fixed from inside

25. Changing the reimbursement, intellectual property and regulatory environment of the IoMT. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is working to strengthen the cybersecurity of medical devices in the wake of computer-hacking threats.

All of this may seem a bit overwhelming because it is. However, those who are fighting the 4th industrial revolution to win won’t wait for you to catch your breath. They are too busy measuring it via an e-meter dose inhaler, capturing your data, and adjusting your insurance rates based on the probability of how your asthma is responding to the last bronchodilator you just puffed.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Physician burnout is pervasive and appears to be worsening. In fact, in some specialties, residents are burned out even before they have spent their first day in practice. But, they are not alone since burnout happens in many industries other than medicine.

Burnout is considered to have a range of symptoms. There is no agreement which of those are part of it and which ones are not. But all definitions given so far have in common that the symptoms are regarded as being the consequence of stressful activities in or outside the job. One possible source of stress outside the job is caring for a family member, for example.

Three main areas of symptoms are considered to be signs of burnout syndrome:

• Emotional exhaustion: People affected feel drained and exhausted, overloaded, tired and low, and do not have enough energy. Physical symptoms include pain or problems with the stomach or bowel.
• Alienation from (job-related) activities: People affected find their jobs increasingly negative and frustrating. They may develop a cynical attitude towards their work environment and their colleagues. They may, at the same time, increasingly distance themselves emotionally, and disengage themselves from their work.
• Reduced performance: Burnout mainly affects everyday tasks at work, at home or when caring for family members. People with burnout regard their activities very negatively, find it hard to concentrate, are listless and experience a lack of creativity.

Burnout can also be described as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results,” and is a stress-related state and there are multiple causes.

Burn out interventions and prevention programs both at the personal and organizational level are successful 80% of the time. However, both personal and organizational interventions are better than either alone, and the results tend to fatigue over time.

Mentors, coaches, sponsors and colleagues might help, but , you need to understand the roles each one plays and when and how to engage them. Here is what to do when your boss refuses to be your sponsor.

Mentors are accountability partners who help you stay on track to meet your goals. They are hard to find and the lack of a mentor is an oft quoted reason for entrepreneurial failure. Many entrepreneurs have a hard time finding the right mentor for various reasons. Mentors help your personal development.

Here are some tips on being a good mentor. It starts with building a genuine relationship.

Sponsors are different from mentors. Their job is to run cover for you in your organization and help you find the scarce resources intrapreneurs need to succeed. They are making an investment in your idea, and, like every investor, they expect a return within a defined time.

Colleagues are people you work with that you admire and can emulate. They are not friends, but rather a honest sounding board. They set an example by their actions. There are many reasons why colleagues make good mentors or confidantes.

Coaches The goal of the coach is to facilitate learning, focus, and results. Coaches are trained in the strategies for achieving the results specific to their domain of coaching. Although they may not have experience generating the results you are looking for in themselves, they should have experience generating these results in other people or organizations. Coaches teach you a skill.

Many of you who are reading this don’t have a mentor. But, here are some ways to change that.

Here are some best practices for mentors and mentees.

Whether you are an employed physician, a community practitioner, a budding CEO of a biomedical or health startup or an intrapreneur, you need help as an antidote to the stress. Take the time to cultivate the right relationship with the right person in the right role and thank your lucky stars you found them.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Digital health has converged with biopharma. It has happened because digital health technologies are making it easier for biopharmaceutical companies to discover, develop and launch new drugs faster and cheaper and improve the patient and doctor experience, in what is being labeled “after the pill”,

U.S. regulators have approved the first digital pill with an embedded sensor to track if patients are taking their medication properly, marking a significant step forward in the convergence of healthcare and technology. Some, however, are voicing concerns that there is no evidence that digital pills, prescription medications with ingestible wireless sensors, are beneficial to patients and, in fact, the technology poses a danger to the provider-patient relationship.

Increasingly, we are seeing the results of the intersection of digital health, biopharma and medtech. Here is an update on digital health pharma news.

What do the next stage of pharma and digital health collaborations look like?

Recent medical developments have gone towards personalized healthcare, meaning that patients get individualized treatments for their specific needs and also manage their disease.

Buzzwords that come to my mind in this context include big data, artificial intelligence, closed loop systems (not only for diabetes), and precision medicine.

Here are the results of a recent survey about the use of digital health in biopharma.

There are many applications:

1. Drug discovery and development using community based innovation networks
2. Better clinical trial recruitment, retention and execution
3. Physician engagement
4. Patient engagement, compliance and adherence
5. Information and education

Here’s how digital health technologies are helping patients with diabetes and hypertension.

6. Remote sensing, data and analytics. For example, Pittsburgh-based UPMC Enterprises has made an equity investment in RxAnte, a predictive analytics and clinical intervention solution provider focused on inappropriate medication use.

RxAnte uses predictive analytics to improve prescribing practices and appropriate use of prescription medications.

7. Post market surveillance and pharmacovigilence

8. Sales and marketing

9. Personalized and precision medicine

10 Price and effectiveness transparency

11.Drug delivery

12. Smart pills

In addition, artificical intelligence, machine learng and blockchain technologies have the potential to improve the research quotient of biopharma drug discovery and development:

3 predictions for AI in pharma R&D in the year ahead:

Prediction 1: Drug discovery is being redefined by advances in technology. AI and machine learning software is expanding the universe of screenable compounds and will deliver higher hit rates as compounds move through the pharma value chain. The race is on for data.

Prediction 2: Within the next 10 years, a blockbuster-potential drug will emerge from a process that started with a computer, then to bench, then to clinic. We will see within the next few years promising compounds enter the FDA pipeline.

Prediction 3: Pharma companies will step up M&A, investment and joint venture activity this year and in 2019 as they look to the world of software AI startups for new drug discovery capabilities. The tailwinds are there for tremendous value creation.

Going beyond the pill will also require new business models and faces the challenges of precision medicine.

Using digital tools to innovate has moved biopharmaceutical companies to create a new

position: chief digital officer and they are developing best practices.

All of these opportunities will challenge STEM graduate and medical school educators and leaders to create new learning objectives that provide the new and necessary competencies for graduates to compete in these evolving industries, particularly in the areas of data science, analytics, mining unstructured data and intelligence. Some universities and health systems, like the University of Colorado, are doing just that. We are also partnering with Startup Health to help entrepreneurs, end users and investors create products and services that fill this market need.

Digital health technologies are changing not only the face of clinical practice entrepreneurship, but medtech and biopharma as well. Given the pace of change, we are likely to see Digital Biopharma 2.0 and Digital Medtech 2.0 in the blink of an app. In fact, we might already have missed it.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Sick care badly needs innovation if it is to become healthcare . Yet, it’s questionable whether it can be fixed from inside. Despite the popularity of open innovation and community based, participatory innovation networks, healthcare organizations and doctors seem to shun outside ideas and collaboration and are perceived as arrogant know-it-alls, stuck in the ivory tower or healthcare city , when it comes to knowing what’s best for patients. They have a silo mindset that blocks collaboration with other stakeholders in the innovation supply chain. The challenge for most organizations is to create and engage stakeholders.

The problem is not unique to sick care. In fact, it is very unusual for any industry to significantly transform itself from inside. In most instances, it happens when ideas or technologies from one industry segment has sex with ideas from another industry segment.

In his book, “Where Good Ideas Come From”, Steven Johnson calls this process adjacent possibilties where edge technologies or platforms collide by chance or serendipity and it is catalyzed by big networks.

The same is true in the ivory towers of academia. Most faculty have no clue who is their neighbor, what they are doing or areas of common or complementary interest let alone faculty interests in other buildings, campuses or the college down the street.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is happening now. It is defined as the collision of physical (sensors, robotics and AI, for example) technologies and machines with advanced information technologies (storage, softward and hardware, e.g.) with biotechnologies. The winners and losers will be those that have the skills developing the heart, mind, soul and body to resist and thrive.

There are several key steps in the process including defining the target community of interest, creating a value proposition, developing a strategic communications plan and executing it and measuring the results so you can change it.

For a start, here are ways to get out of your office, either physically or digitally:

1. Create campus incubators or accelerators that are free from the physical, cultural and organizational constraints of the mother ship.

2. Recruit for innovation and those who are connected and have robust networks outside of healthcare.

3. Create external networks and platforms to support them, driving the pressure and flow of information.

4. Expand academic-healthcare organization-industry knowledge exchange.

5. Aggressively pursue vendor, supplier and patient collaboration while at the same time manage, mitigate or eliminate conflict of interest

6. Balance the conundrum of protecting but sharing data.

7. Create partnerships with researchers interested in validating and deploying digital health products and services

8. Create an organizational concierge, charged with being the one stop contact for your organization to those interested in collaborating.

9. Create a staff research directory that identifies specific areas of interest and contact information

10. Create an organizational asset map, listing your capabilities, assets and core competencies.

11. Have a eMarketing plan that integrates your resources and makes your message relevant.Can you answer yes to all these questions?

I can easily integrate my existing offline and digital marketing channels.

I have the freedom to choose best-of-breed partners.

I can easily integrate new marketing technologies into my stack.

I have a single view of my customers across channels.

I can create seamless customer experiences.

I collaborate with my marketing partners to deliver more relevant marketing.

I can accurately close the loop on every campaign to know which investments are delivering the best results, and optimize accordingly.

I can personalize marketing while respecting consumer privacy.

I am always in compliance with data privacy regulations.

I can deliver relevant, personalized marketing at scale.

12. Find a connector who knows how to build and engage a community of interest.

13. Find a high level sponsor who can provide political cover, clout and admin resources to help connect the dots.

Here are some tips on how and when to work in collaborative teams.

Aligning corporate strategy is key to success.The best performing companies are often the best aligned. But who in your company is paying attention to how well aligned your strategy is with your organization’s purpose and capabilities? In my research and consultancy with companies, I observe that, oftentimes, no individual or group is functionally responsible for overseeing the arrangement of their company from end to end. Multiple different individuals and groups are responsible for different components of the value chain that makes up their company’s design, and they are often not as joined up as they should be. All too often, individual leaders seek — indeed are incentivized — to protect and optimize their own domains, and find themselves locked in energy-sapping internal turf wars, rather than working with peers to align and improve across the entire enterprise.

14. Clusters and advanced industry segments should compare notes from time to time and hold a Technology Innovation Collision Conference. In other words, an Idea Orgy. Here is an example.

15. Find a champion in your state government economic development office, in partnership with the private sector, to champion and promote the process and help pay for it.

Healthcare and academic medical centers are stuck in a series of boxes. If we don’t encourage and expand interdisciplinary collaboration with those in other industries, we will make only incremental progress in an industry that needs mega-change and needs it fast. Like fingers in a glove, we can grasp the future when they work together. When you put fingers in mittens, though, you get the added benefit of warmth and closer contact.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Digital health ecosystems have spread around the world. Like all clusters, they have a life cycle that starts with koombaya and the enthusiasm of creating something new and exciting but, unfortunately, at some point , devolve into conflicting interests who seem more interested in WIIFM with consequent confusion or blurring of the original vision, mission, values, value proposition, business model and leadership challenges. Nascent centripedal forces pulling people towards a common goal turns into a centrifugal force pulling them apart into their own universe as the digital cosmos expands.

The results are the 6 dysfunctions of communities:

Dysfunction #1: Low Awareness or Understanding

• The intended member of the community of interest is unaware that you exist or misunderstood what you do or how you work or your competitive strategy or vision. They think they are laying brinks when, in fact, they are building a cathedral.
• Solution: Active online communications about vision and how they contribute to the big picture.

Dysfunction #2: Wrong Value Proposition fit to stakeholders

• What you are offering does not meet expected jobs, resolve pains or offer enough expected gains or coincide with their values
• Solution: Craft the right value proposition for targeted customer segments

Dysfunction #3: Lack of Trust/Interest

• Potential stakeholders don’t want to engage if they don’t trust you or are not interested in what you have to offer
• Solution: Build trust by saying what you’ll do and doing what you say

Dysfunction #4: Poor Relationships

• Thus, prospects don’t want to risk their emotional investment in the community
• Solution: Build both the quality of the relationship and quantity of the community of interest by paying attention to members

Dysfunction #5: Lack of Engagement

• Those who are connected do not actively engage
• Solution: A strategic communications and engagement plan moving them from awareness to relationship to engagement to advocacy and hiring someone with the talent and skills to execute it

Dysfunction #6: Failed Mission

• The community of interest is unable to achieve its mission due to lack of engagement, alignment and ability to execute and failure to think strategically.
• Solution: Reset and rethink your value proposition, business model and execution strategy

Like most startups, accelerators are driven by the vision and energy of their founders So, when that energy or enthusiasm wavers, or, if, as a result of the changing environment or stage of development, competing entities become more attractive, the founders leave. They generally do so because they like to create things, not run things.

Reversing this law of cluster physics requires constant vigilance or energy, lest the ecosystem suffer from the inevitable entropy. The key is to ask some strategic questions from each component of the cluster:

1. Is the existing business model still viable?
2. What do you do best and what should be delegated to others?
3. What are the KPIs, output and impact you have created so far?
4. Does the leadership team need to be supplemented or replaced?
5. How do you encourage outside in participation from members of other clusters that will drive progress, like aerospace, materials science or cybersecurity?
6. Should your organization be given a merciful death, rebranded or repurposed?
7. How successful have you been in getting, keeping and growing your members?
8. Do you have a sustainable revenue model and pricing structure?
9. Do you have enough investor, public sector, non-profit and academic support?
10. How successful have you been promoting equity, diversity and inclusion?
11. How would you describe the information rheology in your cluster?
12. Does your cluster need a culture check?

Like a start up company, at some point, early digital health clusters and ecosystems need to figure out how to scale and figure out what they want to be when they grow up. Otherwise, like we are seeing now, the universe just gets filled with zombie entities spinning in their own orbits creating just a bunch of cluster clutter and space trash.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Chief Innovation Officers are growing like weeds. Some think their job is to manage innovation. Some even go so far as to define their desirable traits.

They might as well quit since managing innovation will take them in the wrong direction. Instead, they should be leading innovators. Here’s why:

1. Everyone seems to have a different definition of innovation. Be sure you are leading people who have the same understanding and objectives.

2. Managing innovation implies that the core competence of an innovative enterprise is their system or culture. While that is important, successful innovation comes from living, breathing humans who innovate or try to repeatedly despite big obstacles.

3. Managing is about optimizing the efficacy and efficiency or resources. Entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs, some of whom are innovators, pursue opportunity with limited resources with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation.

4. Leaderpreneurs are different than managers and have a different role. They provide vision, direction and inspiration.

5. Managing is about preserving or building the status quo. Innovating is about making the status quo obsolete.

6. Managers rarely assume the roles of intrapreneurial sponsors. Leaderpreneurs have to to be successful.

7. Managers get in the way by controlling. Leaderpreneurs get out of the way by inspiring.

8. Leaderpreneurs create innovation management systems that can be scaled with the goal of making themselves obsolete as quickly as possible. Managers create systems to protect their jobs.

9. Leaderpreneurs organize chaos and serendipity. Managers strive to standardize.

10. Managers think short term costs. Innovation leaderpreneurs measure things as longer term investments.

A recently released Conference Board report showed a strong link between leadership and innovation. The authors identified nine behaviors that are key to getting results:

1. Leaders jointly created a vision with their colleagues.Some have thought leadership to be about coming up with a grand strategy, and then enticing the troops to follow you up the hill. But our data showed leaders creating a vision collaboratively, not in a directive manner.
2. They build trust. We interviewed leaders who were in the top 1% of their organization on creativity. One quality stood out. These leaders trusted their people and in turn their colleagues had an enormous trust in them. One person noted, “To take a risk demands that you feel really safe.” “She always has our back,” said another.
3. Innovation champions were characterized by a willingness to constantly challenge the status quo.People described innovative leaders as fearless and doing what’s right versus what may be politically correct. Some highly effective leaders of innovation were characterized as being “inverse to the environment.”
4. Leaders who fostered innovation were noted for their deep expertise.Colleagues noted that it was this “T” quality that defined these leaders. These leaders had a wide range of intellectual curiosity on a horizontal axis, while at the same time were grounded deeply in their knowledge of the technology at the center of what their group did.
5. They set high goals. Leaders who created innovative teams were noted for setting the bar extremely high, and giving their colleagues the challenge and opportunity to achieve what they believed would be beyond their reach.
6. Innovative leaders gravitate toward speed. These leaders move at a quick pace. They believe things can be accomplished sooner, not later. They gravitate toward the quick prototype that is put together with duct tape and paper clips in one day over a more perfect result they could create in six months. The graph below shows 360 results for 57,113 leaders who were rated on their speed of execution and their ability to innovate. Note that leaders who move slowly are on average rated at the 12th percentile on their ability to innovate while those who are in the top 10 percent are at the 89th percentile.
7. They crave information. Innovative leaders keep the team on the same page by flooding them with relevant facts. They excel at asking good question and then being exceedingly good listeners. The combination of “catch and pitch” helps the team to excel at innovation.
8. They excel at teamwork. The next characteristic of the most innovative leaders was excelling at teamwork and collaboration. It was never about “me.” It was always about the team creating something of value.
9. They value diversity and inclusion. The most innovative leaders recognize that the creative process feeds on bringing people together who possess sharply differing views and experience. It is the blending of these elements that creates highly innovative solutions.

Here are 10 tips on how to create a lead successful innovation teams.

One author noted that “the first step in creating meaningful, long-term, sustainable innovation in any organization is to recognize that cultures cause outcomes.  And if this is true, bad cultures will cause bad outcomes. And if this is true, it further follows that bad leadership causes bad cultures, which in turn cause bad outcomes.”

There are many myths about organizational innovation cultures and how to create them. The truth is that cultures are the result of innovation strategy, structure, processes and people, not the cause. They are created by organizational leaders.

Innovation is not a nebulous concept tucked some where in a strategic plan. Like any combat team, it has a face, a heart and a soul and needs to nurtured and led, not managed. In the end, it’s the people, stupid.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

We have a sick care system that masquerades as a healthcare system. Yet, taking care of patients with acute disease is a lot different than disease prevention, chronic care and complex chronic care disease management and population health.

We need to unbundle the two and create systems, manpower and education programs designed to address the unique challenges of each. We persist in expecting the legions of primary care physicians and some specialists to do it all, which is simply an unrealistic expectation and leads to frustration, poor outcomes, waste and burnout.

Here are some suggestions to start us on the path:

1. Revise medical education competencies to recognized the emerging changes in how sick care and healthcare are being defined and delivered,
2. Change onerous regulatory, legal and accreditation standards.
3. Incorporate interdisciplinary professionals and reward them for providing and coordinating care along the point of care spectrum
4. Close the referral leaks.
5. Create a 21st Century healthcare IT infrastructure that acts like a central nervous system to aggregate the disparate points of care.
6. Build a whole product healthcare IT solution.
7. Create a process that clinically validates healthcare IT products before launch and system that doctors can rely on to decide whether to recommend (or prescribe) them to patients.
8. Unbundle primary care and outsource to other professionals practicing at the top of their license.
9. Create different reimbursement mechanisms for sick care and healthcare.
10. Make systems more user friendly, particularly for patients and those solo and small private practices.
11. Do a better job of training and using technicians to triage patients, like those requesting telemedicine visits, to decide not just where, but whether they need to be treated and billed. Practice tele-triage and tele-prevention before your practice tele-sick care.

Here is what a separate but equal health care system contains, and might look like:

1. Replace high priced knowledge technicians with lower paid behavior change specialists
2. Pay for prevention reimbursement system
3. Create future jobs that don’t exist
4. Train health care workers to win the 4th industrial revolution
5. Match every sick care worker with health care worker on the team
6. Unbundle primary and secondary care education, training and practice
7. Replace the present higher ed business model with cheaper, faster, better, smarter market defined solutions (think Galvanize for healthcare)
8. Teach MPH students public health entrepreneurship
9. Create interprofessional entrepreneurial teams
10. Create social and workforce support systems for workers no longer interested in participating in an industrial model created 100 years ago

Twisting the square healthcare peg into the sick care hole until the edges wear off does not work. We need to redesign the board.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The highest paying jobs in the US are in tech, medicine and law. For the first time, there are more women in medical school than men, but only 30% of the physician workforce are women. 60% of pharmacists are women. However, women hold only 20% of tech jobs. Over one in three lawyers are women.

Several social cross currents are destroying patriarchies in the word of work, including sick care. Particular industries, like pharmacy, are collapsing quicker than others. Are women physicians and other health professionals better suited to win the 4th industrial revolution?

Some are chronicling the end of men, particularly those white males without a college degree in manufacturing and construction trades who were devastated by the Great Recession. In addition. the future of work will reward those with empathy, team building skills, the ability to multitask and communicate-skills where women excel over men. Does this mean an acceleration of the medical matriarchy? Not so fast:

1. There is considerable pushback by the entrenched male interests
2. Men are just as interested in work-life balance as women
3. Gender roles, particularly when it comes to child care and housework, are changing, although, admittedly, the vast majority of it is still done by women who work
4. Social policies drive the gig economy, not just technology, which facilitates it. The gig economy, for example, is for most not a viable solution.

Some medical specialties attract men or women in different ways because of the culture of the specialty. Take urology compared to pediatrics. Women make up a larger percentage of residents in:

• Family medicine (about 58 percent)
• Psychiatry (about 57 percent)
• Pediatrics (about 75 percent)
• Obstetrics/gynecology (about 85 percent)

5. There continues to be bias in professional school selection

6. Burn out torches both men and women

7. A dysfunctional education system and credentialitis impacts both men and women. The result is that half of law school grads. both men and women,don’t practice law, more and more doctors are dropping out of clinical practice and about 30% of college grads have jobs that don’t require the credentials they earned. Over 50% of Uber drivers are college graduates.

8. Significant wage disparities for men and women persist

9. The war of the sexes will continue to ebb and flow

10. By necessity, women are sidetracked due to the underestimated burdens and costs of having children.

11. Millennial debt is gender neutral

Medical alpha males are gradually being displaced by medical alpha females. But, that should not be the goal. I don’t think women doctors play any nicer with other doctors than men and the last thing we need is another dog fight.

Rather we should work towards equitable opportunity, achievement and job satisfaction for both sexes so we can meet that uniquely American pursuit of happiness.

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