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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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

You’ve heard about the 4 P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Promotion and Place (distribution channels)

Whether you are an intrapreneur, a technopreneur, a service provider, own and run a private practice, an edupreneur or a social entrepreneur, the success of your product, service or non-profit will depend on your answering the 5Ps:

1. What is the problem you are trying to solve? Start by being a problem seeker, not a problem solver. Non-profits seek to help specific underserved people as beneficiaries. For profits seek to solve a particular customer problem. Doctors treat patients with problems.
2. Who is the person who has the problem? Defining an industry segment, not a person, as the customer is a rookie business model canvas mistake.Organizations, buildings or companies don’t have problems. People inside of those entitities do. Find out who that person is and get inside their heads and walk in their shoes.
3. How painful is the problem? In part, we have an opioid epidemic because health professionals have not done a good job of quantifying a given level of pain and prescribed the most appropriate analgesic. Entrepreneurs shouldn’t make the same mistake. Is your customer bent over in pain begging for morphine or do they simply have a minor ache and just want an aspirin to make it go away? Unlike the desirability of unwanted addictive medicines, however, creating an addictive technology, e.g.a cell phone, a game or a social media site, can result in a trillion dollar company.
4. How much are people with the problem willing to pay to solve it? Whether and how much someone will pay for your solution depends on several factors, including how much the customer values your solution compared to competitive offerings or the status quo, whether it is a nice to have or a must have solution (like regulatory or compliance requirement satisfaction) or whether it is something proximately linked to the next step, like requiring some education or training to get a certain job or having to have a tool to do a certain job. How much customers are willing to pay will determine, in large part, whether you can make and sell the product at a profit.

Sickcare is a different case because the patient, who is the end user, and the doctor, who acts like a purchasing agent, is often not the person who pays for it. However, look for models where someone else would be willing to pay to have a customer use your product. The most common example is a bilateral market model (dating service) that is sponsored by a company so they can get access to your data or sell something to the users e.g. a medical device company sponsoring an online surgical video journal.

5. Do you have a pipeline/platform to get, keep and grow people willing to pay you? In other words, how will you market and sell your product?

Answering these questions is the purpose of your customer discovery journey and eventually informs your value proposition and business model canvas. Start with answering these basic questions and don’t do anything else until you find the answers.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Innovation starts with the right mindset. Doctors who are considering a side gig or an alternative non-clinical career, have a hard time getting their heads around the entrepreneurial mindset. There is a difference between the clinical mindset and the entrepreneurial mindset.

In my view, only about 1% of doctors have an entrepreneurial mindset because premeds don’t get selected for that trait. They get selected because they know how to memorize a bunch of stuff, take standardized tests, perform at scripted interviews that neither the interviewer nor the interviewee know how to do and they generally know how to conform. They are exceptional at checking off boxes and increasingly refine that skill as they go into clinical practice. Those that get off the reservations do so despite the medical education system, not because of it. They learn early how to diagnose and treat craniorectal inversion syndrome. They have cured their credentialitis.

So, if you are struggling with these head games, try to avoid these mindset mistakes and stop thinking that:

1. Because you have lots of initials after your name that you add value
2. You have to get a non-clinical job to learn the mindset. In fact, the idea is for you to create your own job and hire other folks, not vice versa.
3. You will get paid what you are earning now
4. You are the person who decides whether your ideas, inventions or discoveries have any value. All value is user defined. Here are some business model canvas rookie mistakes.
5. The knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies that got you to where you are now will get you to where you want to go
6. Networking and schmoozing is not important
7. It will take a few months
8. You have to quit your day job
9. You have to create a company
10. You can do it by yourself
11. You can tell truth to authority without consequences
12. You can disrupt without consequences
13. You can blow the whistle without consequences
14. You will get academic promotion and tenure credit for your entrepreneurial activties
15. You won’t get fired

Personalities are fixed. Mindsets, however, can be changed and you and only you can do it. If you are unwilling and/or unable to do that, then maybe you should just continue to see another 20 patients a day until you retire and just stop complaining.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Entrepreneurship means many things to many people. Perhaps the biggest misconception is that entrepreneurship refers, exclusively, to starting businesses. In fact, if we use the definition that entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity with scarce or uncontrolled resources with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation, then it means much more. In fact, there are many ways to innovate and create user defined value, whether it be in sick care or education, other than taking care of patients, starting a business or teaching students.

The conventional wisdom is evident in articles like this one that talks about how institutions of higher learning can help targeted segments start businesses. Instead, they should be talking about how to create entrepreneurial universities and medical schools.

The missing link in all of this is that we don’t recruit, develop and promote edupreneurs- faculty-technologists/social activists acting like entrepreneurs in their schools who are trying to create student and other stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovative, value creating educational technologies, structure, process and outcomes.

Here is what the academic intrapreneur dossier looks like and what would appear in an updated teaching portfolio when it’s time to be considered for promotion and tenure.

Edupreneurship rests on several foundational principles:

1. Having an entrepreneurial mindset
2. Intra- and entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies
3. Design thinking focused on creating stakeholder and beneficiary defined outcomes
4. A systems engineering approach to solving wicked problems, like how to fix outcomes disparities and their social determinants
5. A different business model
6. More respect for and attention to edupreneurial champions
7. Better teacher education and training
8. An incentive and reward system for not just tweaking a failed system , but rather, making it obsolete given the basic structural changes in the US economy
9. Eliminating unnecessary and burdensome bureaucracy, credentialing that does not add value and administrivia
10. Paying more attention to and measuring student defined outcomes
11. Better public-private integration
12. K-20 integration and alignment

Other types of edupreneurs, in addition to faculty, are educational technology entrepreneurs, foundations and funders of educational technologies, work force agencies and those in the government sector experimenting with college to career and retraining models and those offering support for at risk and vulnerable student populations.

Edupreneurs are a neglected pool of talent who are being stifled, ignored and buried by an industry highly resistant to change. Since talent goes where it is treated best, the result will be a death spiral and students will be the victims.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The US Armed Forces has a problem with soldier suicide and depression.

In early 2013, the official website of the United States Department of Defense announced the startling statistic that the number of military suicides in 2012 had far exceeded the total of those killed in battle—an average of nearly one a day. A month later came an even more sobering statistic from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs: veteran suicide was running at 22 a day—about 8000 a year.

The situation became so dire that the U.S. Secretary of Defense called suicide in the military an “epidemic.”

Medicine has it’s problems too. It’s estimated that at least 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves every year. Many are struggling with depression, anxiety, or addiction.

Now, add to the list entrepreneurs. Depressed serial entrepreneurs are coming out of the closet and advocating for awareness and change.

Contrary to popular belief, poor self esteem is a component of some entrepreneurs that drives compensatory behaviors that are misinterpreted as egotistical, self-centered or narcissistic. The results are isolation, depression and loneliness or a feeling that they areimposters.

The commonality of these groups seems to be a “warrior mentality” that encourages soldiers, doctors and entrepreneurs to suck up and repress feelings of anxiety, inadequacy or depression, to “fake it till you make it” or to hide things for fear of retribution or adverse consequences. The military,medical and entrepreneurial cultures see those with self doubt as weak or cowardly.

In addition, at least for successful serial entrepreneurs who thrive on success, like to drive fast, take chances , make money and learn something along the way, their innate make up might make them susceptible to breakdowns. Few want to talk about the loneliness of success, but it is pervasive and the head count seems to be rising.

However, there are at least four personality types of entrepreneurs, and we all have a fall back pattern.

On the other hand, hypomanic, ADHD entrepreneurs are also coming out and turning their behavior into the ADHD Advantage. You can also be more creative is you stop paying attention so much. Research is finding that greater distractibility and a reduced ability to focus—what scientists call decreased cognitive control—is often associated with greater creativity in problem solving. But, being married to an ADHD entrepreneur can kill a marriage, so here are some coping tips for you both.

Here is how one CEO with dyslexia and ADHD runs his company. Here’s another.

If you think you have ADHD, here are some tips on how to deal with it.

If you have Asperger’s Syndrome, Peter Thiel wants to hire you. In her book, The Autistic Brain, Temple Grandin explains the positive side of autism and those with austistic spectrum disorders (ASD) or high function autistics (HFAs): 1) attention or an obsession to detail, 2) being able to see the forest from the trees and patterns others don’t see and 3) creativity that disregards and frequently challenges the convention wisdom or status quo.

In her new book, Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities, medical and science journalist Claudia Kalb looks at twelve famous figures and weighs the evidence suggesting that each suffered from a different kind of mental health condition. The table of contents could be mistaken for the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders.

One common way of assessing the presence of psychopathic traits in people is to use an assessment known as the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Here’s a look at some of the traits it lists to see whether they can cause destruction or promotion in a work environment.

Or, maybe you are suffering from Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN).

Do You…

1. Sometimes feel like you don’t belong when with your family or friends ?
2. Pride yourself on not relying upon others ?
3. Have difficulty asking for help ?
4. Have friends or family who complain that you are aloof or distant ?
5. Feel you have not met your potential in life ?
6. Often just want to be left alone ?
7. Secretly feel that you may be a fraud ?
8. Tend to feel uncomfortable in social situations ?
9. Often feel disappointed with, or angry at, yourself ?
10. Judge yourself more harshly than you judge others ?
11. Compare yourself to others and often find yourself sadly lacking?
12. Find it easier to love animals than people ?
13. Often feel irritable or unhappy for no apparent reason?
14. Have trouble knowing what you’re feeling ?
15. Have trouble identifying your strengths and weaknesses?
16. Sometimes feel like you’re on the outside looking in ?
17. Believe you’re one of those people who could easily live as a hermit ?
18. Have trouble calming yourself ?
19. Feel there’s something holding you back from being present in the moment?
20. At times feel empty inside ?
21. Secretly feel there’s something wrong with you ?
22. Struggle with self-discipline ?

And then there is loneliness and workaholism. A workaholic is a work-obsessed individual who gradually becomes emotionally crippled and addicted to power and control in a compulsive drive to gain approval and public recognition of success. These driven men and women live a Gerbil-wheel, adrenalin-pumping existence rushing from plan A to B, narrowly-fixated on some ambitious goal or accomplishment. Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters.

In addition, there are other other unsung heros. One of the most critical (and most unsung) roles in an entrepreneurial company is not the founder or owner—it’s the role of that person’s significant other or spouse. This has always been true, but the challenges (and importance) of these individuals is even greater and more crucial in the challenging business climate we currently face.

“If an entrepreneurial company fails, it can often take the family’s finances down with it, which can lead to marital troubles or even trigger divorce.”

Everyone pays the price for their choices, whether they accept it or not. But, our infatuation with successful entrepreneurs comes at a price we would rather not see, let alone accept and the results are soldiers fighting the business wars and medical students coming home in body bags.

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