Author Archives: Arlen Meyers

About Arlen Meyers

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

Forming Good Entrepreneurial Habits

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Going from Said to Done

Forming Good Entrepreneurial Habits

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Are you trying to change and practice entrepreneurial habits? Science can help and here’s how.

As you progress in your career, it often gets harder to ask for help in reaching your goals and staying accountable to yourself to achieve them. If you’ve reached a career plateau, this author recommends three strategies to hold yourself accountable to your goals:

  • Enlist an accountability partner
  • Go public in declaring and sharing goals
  • Change your environment

Here are some new entrepreneurial habits that might contribute to your success and change your innovator’s DNA gene expression:

1. Put 5 books on your nightstand that you read for 30 minutes before going to bed. William Osler suggested it for doctors but it should work for entrepreneurs, too. Yes, you can read 50 books a year. The new twist on the concept is the 5 hour rule.

2. Subscribe to 5 newsletters completely outside of your field to find new sources of innovation and inspiration. Most true innovation rarely comes from inside.

3. Write 500 words about anything, anywhere every day. It can be in a journal. It can be on a Pulse post, It can be an evolving book or it can simply be on your iPad. Perhaps the biggest gap in my formal education was in writing. The only way to overcome that deficit is to discipline yourself to practice, practice, practice.

4. Invite at least one person every day to join your linkedin network who you think you can help.

5. Practice random acts of kindness when someone asks you to do them a favor that does not compromise your integrity. It’s good for your karmic bank account.

6. Watch children play every now and then. Like Jobs said at Stanford, be playful and stay hungry.

7. Use vacations as a way to create new habits. Change the rewards and cut yourself some slack instead of practicing incessant self denial. Productivity decreases when you reach a certain numbers of hours of work in a day. Try to do more in less time by eliminating unproductive distractions, overconnectedness or finding when your creative, imaginative biorhythm kicks in. Aim to work 20 hours a week.

8. Set goals with your spouse.

9. Have a fun fund. Not an emergency fund. Not a retirement fund, A fun fund you use to reward new and constructive behaviors. Don’t make it too small or too large. Just enough.

10. When your inner voice says no, create a space between the stimulus and your response. Say yes more often and try new things. Say no more often to things and people that are not aligned with your goals.

11. Train your brain to have patience and leave more time for Type 2 thinking (slow) instead of Type 1(fast) that leads to bad decisions based on intuition and bias.

12. Think positively to act positively. Here are 10 ways to do it

13. Keep a daily log of your small accomplishments each day and congratulate yourself. Nothing succeeds like success, not matter how small.

14. See things differently. Great creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs look at the world in ways that are different from how many of us look at things. This is why they see opportunities that other people miss.

15. Move from self-awareness to self-improvement

16. Join communities that a have employees set aside time for work that is important but not urgent. We call this proactive time or pro-time.re different from one another. Balance generalism with specialized focus.

17. Set aside time for work that is important but not urgent.

18. Practice gratitude.

19. Prune

20. Practice the power of negative entrepreneurship

21. Learn something new every day

22. Do something that scares you every day

23.Make these 6 practices a habit

Changing your morning routine might help. Mine includes reading, thinking and writing articles like this one.

Take advantage of the science of happiness by doing these four things.

Here are 5 more habits to future-proof your brain.

There are no short-cuts along the entrepreneurial journey. There are only habits that take time, repetition and the motivation to develop. You should focus on a few critical behaviors that have:

Implementation criteria include:

  • Actionability: Are people able to perform the behavior?
  • Degree of visibility: Can people see others performing the behavior?
  • Measurability: Can you measure (preferably objectively) whether people are performing the behavior?
  • Speed of results: Can people performing the behavior deliver results in the short term?
  • Ease of implementation: Given the current organizational environment, how easy/difficult will it be for people to perform the new behavior?

Some of these principles apply to organizations as well. When it comes to turning strategy to action, pay attention to this check list

Here are some ways to turn insight into execution by rewiring your brain and your team’s too.

These new habits will probably take several months to create. Here are some tips, backed by research, for forming new healthy habits.

Part of surgical training involves creating patterns of behavior that are habit forming. While, on the one hand, it helps to standardize care, it also can lead to making Type 1 and Type 2 technology adoption errors and faulty diagnostic thinking because it precludes other possibilities. The same applies to entrepreneurs.

Try to avoid what your basal ganglia is telling you to do when it makes sense. Like the man says, you’ll like how you feel. But, like they say, innovation and entrepreneurship is much easier said than done. Habits will set you free.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Mentors Advise and Sponsors Invest

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Mentors Advise and Sponsors Invest

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Whether you are a physician entrepreneur or intrapreneur, the primary thing that matters is that you can recruit people to help you and find the assets you need to be successful.

In the initial stages of your career, one of the most important things you can do is build relationships that will have a significant impact on your life over time. These five relationships can accelerate your path to a promotion, increase your visibility within an organization, and stretch you beyond your comfort zone into to the leader you aspire to be.

  • Mentor: A mentor can help you broaden your functional expertise, grow your emotional intelligence, and learn your company’s unwritten rules.

  • Sponsor: While mentors give you advice and perspective, sponsors advocate on your behalf and in some cases, directly present you with career advancement opportunities.

  • Partner: A partner is an ally or peer who can serve as a sounding board to broaden your perspective. This relationship is fueled by trust, a shared drive to succeed, and the recognition that you can do better together.

  • Competitor: Competition between peers is inevitable. And, when used correctly, it leads to improved performance, breakthrough ideas, and greater drive to get things done.

  • Mentee: Becoming a mentor will teach you how to bring out the best in others, recognize their strength, give feedback, and coach. In turn, it will push you to be better and to strive for more.

For workers just starting their careers, remote setups come with significant challenges, according to journalists Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel. While companies adapted to get work done virtually, in-person policies such as mentorship programs and networking events did not always make the transition, leaving new employees feeling adrift. When the authors asked early-career workers what resources they’d most benefit from, many wanted a “clearly delineated mentor who — crucially — was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance.”

There’s an old African proverb that says, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The idea here is that young people need to interact with and build relationships with a variety of people to grow up well-versed and thrive. This can also be applied to the workplace, specifically to early career professionals.

In the initial stages of your career, one of the most important things you can do is build a village of your own. We’re not talking about a college network, LinkedIn friends, or the people who you met one time at a conference. We’re referring to the relationships that will have a significant impact on your life over time — ones that can accelerate your path to a promotion, increase your visibility within an organization, and stretch you beyond your comfort zone into to the leader you aspire to be.

Throughout our careers as executive coaches, we’ve seen success manifest as a result of these connections. In fact, there are five relationships that we believe are key to anyone’s professional growth. Think of them as your personal board of directors. It will take time to build meaningful relationships with each, so you better start NOW.

1. The Mentor

When a more experienced person teaches someone new, the knowledge transfer that takes place is unparalleled. Some of the most successful people ever have mentors to thank (in part) for their careers. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers mentored Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Author and poet Maya Angelou mentored Oprah Winfrey, and music legend Ray Charles mentored the equally talented Quincy Jones.

Think of a mentor as the north star that will keep you on track when you’re feeling lost at work. They are the one person inside (or outside) of your organization who you can turn to for guidance — whether you are looking to expand your industry knowledge, navigate a difficult conversation, listen to feedback on a project, or get some encouragement when times are tough. They are reliable, wise, and most importantly, honest. Mentorship is all about having challenging conversations that help increase your self-awareness and help you grow both personally and professionally.

Great mentors are often proven leaders who have navigated corporate politics and advanced their career within an organization or industry that aligns with your longer-term goals. To find one, think about someone whose path you deeply admire but is still within reach, someone who may actually respond to your email or LinkedIn message. A potential mentor has to be open to forming a professional relationship with you because, more often than not, they’re pressed for time and mentoring takes effort.

Once you’ve identified a potential mentor, reach out to them in writing. Don’t start with “Would you be my mentor?” These kind of bonds form slowly after you’ve both had a chance to interact and build trust. Instead, share one or two things you admire about their work, and explain why you’re contacting them in the first place. You might say, “I attended the digital conference last week and was intrigued by your talk on what makes content go viral. I’m new to this field, and I’m interested in specializing in video production. I’d love to hear your career story and how you got here. Would it be possible for us to have a quick video chat sometime within the next couple of weeks so I can learn more?”

After your initial meeting, take the time to engage with them regularly — potentially quarterly or bimonthly — updating them on your projects, progress, and achievements. This will help you develop a reputation as someone who can manage stakeholders and deliver what you set out to do. Building a strong personal brand by displaying your competence, experience, and positive attitude is an effective way to attract the interest of powerful people at your company. Potential mentors will want to advise someone who is already on an upward trajectory.

2. The Sponsor

While mentors give you advice and perspective, sponsors advocate on your behalf, and in some cases, directly present you with career advancement opportunities. They play a role in the “behind closed doors” conversations that you may not be included in, and can support your boss in advocating for you in front of other members of the leadership team.

Morgan Stanley’s Managing Director Carla Harris gets it right in her TED Talk. “A mentor, frankly, is a nice-to-have,” she says, “but you can survive a long time in your career without one. You are not going to ascend in any organization without a sponsor.”

Research backs her up. A junior manager with a sponsor is 21% more likely to climb up the career ladder than someone in the same position without one. The global think tank and advisory group Coqual even devised the phrase the “sponsor effect” to describe how high power is transferred in the workplace. Their research found that “one in four white men in the middle ranks of workplaces have sponsorship, but only one in eight women and just one in 20 minorities have them,” indicating opportunities for greater sponsorship among gender and diverse groups for advancement.

To find a sponsor, you need to begin by showing people in your organization that you’re someone worth advocating for. This means you must be great at what you do — and your work must be visible.

Start by thinking about what unique skills, cultural knowledge, or generational life experiences you can share with your organization that will add value to their mission and help them reach outstanding goals. For example, if you work at an agency that is looking to bring innovative advertising offerings to their clients, your manager might be interested in learning more about emerging video-sharing networks like TikTok or live-streaming platforms like Twitch. If you have first-hand experience with these technologies, then offer to host a zoom “brown bag” lunch to share your knowledge.

Sponsors, like mentors, are in high demand and difficult to recruit. But if you develop a standout reputation, they might end up coming to you. Alternatively, you may be able to ask your mentor to make an introduction or reach out yourself for an introductory chat over coffee. Whatever you do, the first time you meet with a potential sponsor, be sure to enter the conversation with a purpose. Ask them questions about their career path, work, passions, and goals. Then, share your own. You want to build a foundation of good intention and rapport.

3. The Partner

A partnership is a mutually beneficial peer relationship. It is fueled by trust, a shared drive to succeed, and the recognition that you can do better together. Your partner is an ally who can serve as a sounding board to broaden your perspective, a collaborator to tackle problems with, and a connector that can help you build out your personal brand and expand your network.

Your partner is not always your work BFF. This relationship is more transactional. You each have an explicit intent to elevate yourselves by elevating each other.

One powerful example of a partnership can be observed through the women in President Obama’s administration. They used an “amplification” strategy to support one another and make their collective voices heard. When a woman made a key point during a meeting, the other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author.

Simply put, finding a partner is similar to finding a co-founder — look for someone whose personality and work ethic complement your own. You want a person who will fill the gaps in your working style. For instance, if you are more of an introvert who avoids public speaking, look for a partner who enjoys presenting and will promote your shared projects when doing so. If you are a strategic, big-picture person who doesn’t thrive with the details, look for a partner who is strong in analytics and operations.

It’s also important to choose a partner, such as a peer or cross-functional team-member, who are working towards the same outcome as you.

A good first step towards building this relationship is becoming an advocate for other people’s work. Pay attention to who reciprocates your enthusiasm. They may be a good candidate for the role. Ultimately, what makes a partnership work is the idea that you two will be more successful together.

4. The Competitor

The business world is full of rivalries: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos vs. Elon Musk. Indra Nooyi vs. Irene Rosenfeld. Some of these rivalries have resulted in amazing breakthroughs.

Competition can be healthy if it’s focused on achieving results (a win-win) rather than battling for resources (a win-lose). When used correctly, it can serve as a motivation to hone and improve your skills and lead to improved performance, breakthrough ideas, and a greater drive to get things done.

Your competitor could be your ally or even your partner. Imagine that you and a peer come up with two great ideas for executing a project. You know that both of you have the potential to think up unique and separately effective solutions. Instead of butting heads and trying to choose one over the other, how might the end result look if you collaborated and came up with something that’s much more effective and valuable?

That’s what competitors can do. The idea is to win, not win over.

Remember that competitive relationships show up naturally at work. As Dr. Stephen Covey states in his business classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a win-win attitude possesses three vital character traits; integrity, maturity, and abundance mentality. So, choose your competitor after evaluating these traits. Once you have identified a potential competitor in your company, schedule a one-on-one meeting. One way to entice them to work with you, instead of against you, is to have a vulnerable conversation. Be sure to tell them you admire them professionally and consider them a formidable peer. Then, share your aspirations, ask them about their goals, and figure out if there are ways you can help each other succeed.

5. The Mentee

Physics Nobel Prize winner and Cal Tech Professor Richard Feynman coined the phrase, “If you want to master something, teach it.” Most of us have been teachers at some point in our lives. Whether we’re teaching our friends how to play a card game, our kids how to ride a bike, or our classmates how to better understand a difficult concept. No matter the situation, assuming the role of the teacher helps you gain greater clarity of a subject by breaking it down into simple steps, or by articulating a complex problem in a more understandable way.

At work, having a mentee serves this purpose — it allows you to be the teacher. Whether you help onboard an intern or assist a new colleague in navigating the specifics of a project they’ve been assigned, you learn more by teaching more.

Becoming a mentor also helps hone important soft skills that every leader should have: strong communication, creativity, and empathy. Employers are looking to groom leaders who can provide clear direction, be innovative problem solvers, and who have emotional intelligence. As a mentor, you are a leader and role model. You learn to bring out the best in others, recognize their strengths, give feedback, and coach. Thus, this role will push you to be better and to strive for more.

Seek out these opportunities internally by looking for interns or new employees that may need help settling in. You can also do this externally by mentoring in affinity organizations such as your alma mater or a non-profit. That said, if done at work, being a mentor will give you more visibility and help build up that good reputation we discussed.

Sometimes forming these relationships will happen randomly and without effort. But you can accomplish so much more if you are open and intentional about it. So, don’t leave things to chance. As the Roman philosopher Seneca puts it, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Some will be teachers to educate you. Some will be coaches who teach you a skill. Some will be mentors who help you develop as a person.

Mentoring can be a challenge as workers and students are more diversified.

Some of those people will be advisors who offer guidance about how to grow your company.. Some will be mentors who typically develop a more meaningful and deeper relationship that has a more lasting impact. Here are some dos and don’ts about mentoring. One is if you are terrible at relationships, don’t volunteer to be one. Stick with being a thought or key opinion leader or role model. It will save both you and your mentees a lot of disappointment.

But, most need not mentors, coaches or advisors, but rather sponsors who not only give you advice and support, but invest in you and your ideas with the expectation, like all investors, that they will get some defined, measurable return.

The ROI does not need to be just money, although generating revenue via a new program or offering helps. Other valuable deliverables are innovative ways to move forward the mission, a tool to recruit new students or employees, a way to motivate or retain existing employees, faculty to students or something that improves the customer experience.

Take the case of Dr. Smith, who was a highly regarded specialist in her field, hired to “change how we do things around here”. During the interview process, everyone expressed support and said all the right things. It worked. Unfortunately, when Dr. Smith arrived 8 months later, many in leadership positions had left or had been fired, Dr. Smith had a hard time finding someone willing to support her change agenda and, instead, was left being subsumed by the status quotidiens and an unsupportive department chairman.

For intrapreneurs, engaged employees trying to act like entrepreneurs adding value to their organizations, finding sponsors can sometimes be more difficult than finding angels or more typical investors in companies. If you are an intrapreneur looking for a sponsor, here are ten tips:

  1. Pick your spot carefully. Be sure you work on a problem that is important, not just interesting. Important means it’s something that the sponsor might want to see happen. Interesting is something that just piques your interest.

  2. Use an effective pickup line. Craft a value proposition that covers the bases and tells the story to hook potential sponsors and in no uncertain terms makes clear what’s in it for them if they give you their support and you are successful.

  3. Network before you have to. Build connections and relationships early and develop them. It starts when you are thinking of applying for a new job and need to build a potential support system at the new place.

  4. Don’t just focus on those above you in the food chain. Colleagues, coworkers and friends can be great sources of support as you move your project forward.

  5. Test a little, learn a lot. Do a pilot project or experiment to test your proof of concept. Use the results to sell your ideas to sponsors.

  6. Be careful about asking for forgiveness instead of permission .

  7. Practice intrapreneurial survival skills.

  8. Build your bench strength to go to when your sponsor gets cold feet, gets fired, moves on or retires.

  9. Think impact, scalability and sustainability. Create and validate a business model that will assure growth, sustainability and impact and that can be executed with some high level of assuredness.

  10. Think short term. While your vision might be to create something that will have long-term transformational impact, the sponsor will usually answer to someone or some thing that expects to see some immediate return on investment or signals that the effort is successful.

Getting buy in for your ideas from a manager or administrator in your organization is tough. They have conflicting claims on their time and resources and are forever doing the political calculus when it comes to placing bets. But, like most people, they buy emotionally and justify rationally and , at least at some level, they do the cost-benefit to factor in what’s in it for them and the organization. Be sure you have a good answer when you ask someone to sponsor you.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Innovation Champions and Pilot Partners from Outside In

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Innovation Champions and Pilot Partners from Outside In

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Creating corporate innovation is never easy and takes several steps. Carlson and Wilmot mention 5 disciplines:

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

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

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

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

5. 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 or artificial intelligence 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? Unless you have a clinical champion on board, your produce is probably DOA.

What are early adopters?

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

21. Expand your networks and engage with those who have demonstrated a focused interest, e.g. the Healthcare Artificial Intelligence Linkedin group and The American Board of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.

22. What Linkedin Sales Navigator won’t teli you

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

As companies have transitioned to remote work and virtual meetings during the pandemic, one common piece of wisdom has emerged: It’s much easier to transition an existing relationship to video than it is to create new ones. That’s especially true in B2B sales. Many companies have coped with this by using this time to deepen relationships with existing customers. However, sales teams should not give up on finding new customers during this period, too. This article offers tips on how to do that.

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.

Image credit: Pixabay

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What Entrepreneurship Education Really Teaches Us

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What Entrepreneurship Education Really Teaches Us

It’s been 100 years since Harvard Business School began using the case study method. Beyond teaching specific subject matter, the case study method excels in instilling meta-skills in students. This article explains the importance of seven such skills: preparation, discernment, bias recognition, judgement, collaboration, curiosity, and self-confidence.

Now, project-based learning has emerged as another experiential learning model.

Some educators define meta-skills as a group of long-lasting abilities that allow someone to learn new things more quickly.

I have been teaching biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship for several years now and my students have told me they learned much more than how to start a company or launch an organizational initiative, In fact, we start every course with defining entrepreneurship as the pursuit of opportunity under volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions (VUCA) with the goal of creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model to achieve the quintuple aims.

Here is what I learned teaching entrepreneurship to 1st year medical students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Knowledge is what you know. Skills are things you learn how to do. Abilities are your natural talents. Competencies are what you need to know how to do to accomplish a given goal. Meta-KSAs are the things that you know, learn and do that are transferable.

Here is a list entrepreneurial virtues and competencies.

Other entrepreneurial meta-KSAs you will learn about are:

  1. Failure
  2. Selling things, including yourself
  3. Stories
  4. Fear
  5. Emotions
  6. Empathy
  7. Pattern recognition
  8. Testing and experimenting
  9. Data generation and analysis
  10. Resilience and perseverance
  11. Mindset
  12. Questioning

Entrepreneurship education and training is more about learning life skills that are used to create value, not just companies. We should start teaching it in pre-school. The longer we wait, the harder it is to learn and apply the meta-KSAs. It is unlikely that the Facebook version of Meta will be as helpful.

Image credit: Pixabay

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The ABCDEs of Technology Adoption

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The ABCDEs of Technology Adoption

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Every day, doctors have to make daily decisions about whether or not to adopt a new technology and add it their clinical armamentarium, either replacing or supplementing what they do. In doing so, they run the risk of making a Type 1 or a Type 2 adoption error.

Epistemology is a branch of philosophy generally concerned with the nature of knowledge. It asks questions such as ‘How do we know?’ and ‘What is meaningful knowledge?’. Understanding what it means to have knowledge in a particular area—and the contexts and warrants that shape knowledge—has been a fundamental quest for centuries.

Data Information Knowledge Wisdom Pyramid

In Plato’s Theaetetus, knowledge is defined as the intersection of truth and belief, where knowledge cannot be claimed if something is true but not believed or believed but not true. Using an example from neonatal intensive care, this paper adapts Plato’s definition of the concept ‘knowledge’ and applies it to the field of quality improvement in order to explore and understand where current tensions may lie for both practitioners and decision makers. To increase the uptake of effective interventions, not only does there need to be scientific evidence, there also needs to be an understanding of how people’s beliefs are changed in order to increase adoption more rapidly.

Only 18% of clinical recommendations are evidence based. There are significant variations in care from one doctor to the next. Physicians practicing in the same geographic area (and even health system) often provide vastly different levels of care during identical clinical situations, including some concerning variations, according to a new analysis.

Clinical and policy experts assessed care strategies used by more than 8,500 doctors across five municipal areas in the U.S., keying in on whether they utilized well-established, evidence-backed guidelines. They found significant differences between physicians, including some working in the same specialty and hospital.

The study results were published Jan. 28 in JAMA Health Forum.

One practice difference the authors found surprising was in arthroscopic knee surgery rates. In these cases, the top 20% of surgeons performed surgery on 2%-3% of their patients, while the bottom 20% chose this invasive option for 26%-31% of patients with the same condition being treated in the same city.

The question is why?

There’s an old joke that there are two ways everyone sees the world: those that see it as a 2×2 matrix and those that don’t.

Type 1 Type 2 Errors Kris Martin

A type 1 error occurs when they make a “false positive” error and use or do something that is not justified by the evidence. Type 2 errors, on the other hand are “false negatives” where the practitioner rejects or does not do something that represents best evidence practice.

The most recent example is the campaign to get doctors to stop prescribing low value interventions and tests. The Choosing Wisely campaign, which launched five years ago, hasn’t curbed the widespread use of low-value services even as physicians and health systems make big investments in the effort, a new report found.

The analysis, released  in Health Affairs, said a decrease in unnecessary healthcare services “appear to be slow in moving” since the campaign was formed in 2012. The report found that recent research shows only small decreases in care for certain low-value services and even increases for some low-value services.

The reasons why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work are many. The proportion of medical procedures unsupported by evidence may be nearly half. In addition, misuse of cannabis, supplements, neutriceuticals and vitamins are rampant.

Evidence-based practice is held as the gold standard in patient care, yet research suggests it takes hospitals and clinics about 17 years to adopt a practice or treatment after the first systematic evidence shows it helps patients. Here are some ways to speed the adoption of evidence based care.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why there are barriers to adoption and penetration of new technologies that can result in these errors. I call them the ABCDEs of technology adoption:

Attitudes: While the evidence may point one way, there is an attitude about whether the evidence pertains to a particular patient or is a reflection of a general bias against “cook book medicine”

Biased Behavior: We’re all creatures of habit and they are hard to change. Particularly for surgeons, the switching costs of adopting a new technology and running the risk of exposure to complications, lawsuits and hassles simply isn’t worth the effort. Doctors suffer from conformation bias, thinking that what they do works, so why change?

Here are the most common psychological biases. Here are many more.

Why do you use or buy what you do? Here is a introduction to behavioral economics.

Cognition: Doctors may be unaware of a changing standard, guideline or recommendation, given the enormous amount of information produced on a daily basis, or might have an incomplete understanding of the literature. Some may simply feel the guidelines are wrong or do not apply to a particular patient or clinical situation and just reject them outright. In addition, cognitive biases and personality traits (aversion to risk or ambiguity) may lead to diagnostic inaccuracies and medical errors resulting in mismanagement or inadequate utilization of resources. Overconfidence, the anchoring effect, information and availability bias, and tolerance to risk may be associated with diagnostic inaccuracies or suboptimal management.

In addition,  there is a critical misunderstanding of what information randomized trials provide us and how health care providers should respond to the important information that these trials contain.

  • Has this trend been studied?
  • If so, who conducted the study?
  • Was it somebody who may make money based on study results?
  • Did the study include a control group?
  • What population did they use to test this trend?

Do you know how to read the medical literature?

Denial: Doctors sometimes deny that their results are suboptimal and in need of improvement, based on “the last case”. More commonly, they are unwilling or unable to track short term and long term outcomes to see if their results conform to standards.

Emotions: Perhaps the strongest motivator, fear of reprisals or malpractice suits, greed driving the use of inappropriate technologies that drive revenue, the need for peer acceptance to “do what everyone else is doing” or ego driving the opposite need to be on the cutting edge and winning the medical technology arms race or create a perceived marketing competitive advantage. In other words, peer pressure and social contagion is present in medicine as much as anywhere else. “Let’s do this test, just in case” is a frequent refrain from both patients and doctors, when in fact, the results of the treatment or test will have little or no impact on the outcome. It is driven by a combination of fear, the moral hazard and bias.

Here are some common customer fears when it comes to adopting a new product or technology and how to overcome them.

 Although investment in start-ups is significant, complex barriers to implementing change and innovation remain.

These “unnecessary” barriers, which vary from complicated funding structure to emotional attitudes towards healthcare, have resulted in the uneven advancement of medical technologies – to the detriment of patients in different sectors.

Economics: What is the opportunity cost of my time and expertise and what is the best way for me to optimize it? What are the incentive to change what I’m doing?

Here are three insights as to why physicians are still skeptical about using wearable technology to monitor patients’ health:

  1. Data access. Clinicians aren’t interested in using wearables if data from the devices isn’t connected to their organization’s EHR. Only 10 percent of physicians said they have integrated data from patient wearables, leaving clinicians unable to access the data or having to enter it manually.

  2. Data accuracy. Some physicians do not trust data from consumer wearable devices; for example, the FDA and other global regulators have cleared a smartwatch application that can alert patients who have already been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation when they are experiencing episodes. However, the capability is less useful as a mass screening tool and has generated many false positive results.

  3. User error and anxiety. If a wearable device is not worn correctly, it may generate inaccurate results. Some who use wearables to monitor their health can also become too focused on vitals such as heart rhythm and pulse rate, which can cause anxiety-induced physical reactions that mimic conditions such as atrial fibrillation.

The past 600 years of human history help explain why humans often oppose new technologies and why that pattern of opposition continues to this day. Calestous Juma, a professor in Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, explores this phenomenon in his latest book, “Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies.”

Here are the key takeaways.

Research indicates that doctors make these kinds errors frequently(http://ecp.acponline.org/sepoct01/pilson.pdf). Moreover, we are witnessing the development of digital health technologies like medical mobile apps, most of which are not clinically validated. So, how should a clinician decide when to adopt new technology? How much evidence is sufficient for an unsophisticated physician to begin adopting or applying a technological innovation for patient care? How do you strike a balance between innovation and evidence from a patient safety and quality standpoint?

Changing patient behavior has been described as the “next frontier”. To make that happen, we will need to change doctor behavior as well.Some interventions work but passive interventions don’t.

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Recognize, that like most customers, surgeons buy emotionally and justify rationally.
  2. Surgeons should be introspective about how and when they adopt new technologies and try to minimize Type 1 and Type 2 errors
  3. While an initial step is to be sure that surgeons are aware of new information that might drive an adoption decision, research indicates that simply presenting them with that information does not change behavior.
  4. Doctors should be skeptical about digital health technologies that might be technically and commercially validated, but not clinically validated.
  5. Doctors will have to resolve the conflict between best evidence and personalized medicine. We face the opportunity to individualize care yet are faced with the challenges of delivering mass customized care when it is becoming increasingly commoditized.
  6. Technology adoption, diffusion and sustainability vary depending on the product offering like drugs, devices, digital health products, care delivery innovation or business process innnovation.
  7. Doctors often have nothing to do with choosing which technology is adopted or, more importantly, paid for by a third party.
  8. Doctors, particularly those that are employed, have to concern themselves more and more with making the numbers, which involves implicitly or covertly rationing care, as irrational as it may be.
  9. Conflicts of interest hide, in some instances, the motivation for technology adoption.
  10. Doctors have high switching costs when it comes to including something new in their therapeutic armamentarium.
  11. In most instances, dissemination and implementation has more to do with leading change than the technology. Consequently it is best to get buy in from clinicians early, define a clear unmet need, have internal champions and leadership from the C-suite.
  12. Adoption and penetration happens in organizations when there is a match between the values and skills of intrapreneurs and organizational innovation readiness as demonstrated by teams that are willing to pull the oars in the same direction.
  13. Here are some ways to to change doctor prescribing habits to conform to evidence based medicine

The job doctors want virtual care technologists to do is that they want you to give them a QWILT: quality, workflow efficiencies,income, protection from liability and giving them more time spend with patients (face to face, since, in most instances, that’s how they get paid) Increasingly, they also want to spend more time “off the clock”, instead of being overburdened with EMR pajama time and answering non-urgent emails or patient portal messages.

While monetary incentives and behavioral “nudges” both have their strengths, neither of them is sufficient to reliably change clinician behavior and improve the quality of their care. Sometimes nudging helps. Organizational culture, while diverse and complex, provides another important lens to understand why clinicians are practicing in a certain way and to put forth more comprehensive, long-term solutions.

The public shares some culpability. Americans often seem to prefer more care than less. But a lot of it still comes from physicians, and from our inability to stop when the evidence tells us to. Professional organizations and others that issue such guidelines also seem better at telling physicians about new practices than about abandoning old ones.

Medicine has a lot to learn from the consumer products industry when it comes to using the power of brands to change behavior. Some are using personal information technologies to give bespoke information to individual patients, much like Amazon suggesting what books to buy based your preferences. We need to do the same thing for doctors.

Like most consumer electronics customers, doctors will almost always get more joy from technology the longer they wait for it to mature. Cutting-edge gadgets can invoke awe and temptation, but being an early adopter involves risk, and the downsides usually outweigh the benefits.

There are many barriers to the adoption and penetration of medical technologies. The history of medicine is full of examples, like the stethoscope, that took decades before they were widely adopted. Hopefully, with additional insights and data, it won’t take us that long.

Image credits: Pixabay, ResearchGate.net, Kris Martin

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Innovation Theater – How to Fake It ‘Till You Make It

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Innovation Theater - How to Fake It 'Till You Make It

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The overwhelming number of doctors, engineers and scientists don’t have an entrepreneurial mindset. What’s more, when they have an idea, they don’t know what to do with it since they will not learn those competencies in their formal training. They just don’t know how to innovate their way out of our sick care mess.

But, that hasn’t stopped lots of them from trying, include non-sick care entrepreneurs. They just improvise.

Now that Elizabeth Holmes has been convicted, many are commenting on the pros and cons of the “fake it ’till you make it” ethos of entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley. But, is this really a black and white issue? Is it true that “You have no business being something you are not, or doing something without proving your worth.” I venture to say many of us, including me, have done something that was not a good fit and we have all tried things when we simple did not know what we did not know.

Here’s how to fake it when you don’t know what you are doing or you forgot your lines:

  1. Avoid these wannapreneur rookie mistakes.
  2. If you are a female, find a male wing man so someone will invest in your product
  3. Surround yourself with people who are way above your pay grade at lots of Meetups
  4. Practice Therantology
  5. When you inevitably fail, make a big deal out of it and about how much you learned from your mistakes and include them on your Linked profile. Rinse. Repeat
  6. Wear a fleece vest with your company logo
  7. Plead ignorance about how hard it is to get anybody in sick care to change and the long sales cycles.
  8. Be sure you have lots of hood ornaments (doctors with fancy titles) on your advisory board prominently posted on your website
  9. Hire a virtual assistant that answers all of your calls and says that she/he will not be able to immediately connect you because you are in an investor meeting
  10. Get your co-working space guy to allow you to use more space than you are actually paying for when people come for meetings. Bribe interns with pizza to come and look busy.
  11. Forget being your authentic self. “You are generally better off coming across as likable, which will generally require some effort, restraint, and attention to what others expect and want to see. Seeming authentic in the process is the cherry on top of the cake, but it requires a fair amount of faking.”
  12. Try being a good rebel even if you are a bad one.
No alt text provided for this image

During these times, we are supposed to wear a mask. Most of us wear a mask all the time to hide our insecurities or avoid being outed as an imposter or physician wannapreneur, so none of this should be new to you.

 In a follow-up to their February 2021 article challenging the commonly understood definition of imposter syndrome, authors Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey offer actionable steps managers can take to end imposter syndrome in their organizations. Doing so will require work at both the interpersonal and organizational levels, and success will depend in part on gathering data and implementing real mechanisms for accountability. The authors call on managers to stop calling natural, human tendencies of self-doubt, hesitation, and lack of confidence “imposter syndrome.” Those who want women to lend their full talents and expertise must question the culture at work — not their confidence at work.

These things come with practice. But, since you are part of innovation theater, practice your lines, be sure you are wearing the right costume and that the stage is set properly. Break a leg.

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Finding the Right Physician Advisor for a Healthcare Startup

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Finding the Right Physician Advisor for a Healthcare Startup

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

It has never been easier to create a sickcare startup, particularly in digital health. Part of that process requires that founders find the right players to be on the team. In many instances, that will involve finding physician advisors or consultants.

But, how do you find the right physician advisors?

Here are some tips:

  1. Clearly define the optimal candidate by writing a job description that includes the knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies you want. Are you looking for someone with an entrepreneurial mindset or someone with just domain expertise? One expert suggests that they should be able to communicate a deep understanding of their domain effectively and understand the context of both their organizations and those they work with. Moreover, emotional competence is essential to developing strong interpersonal skills and succeeding in any workplace. Professionals should also strive to be effective teachers and build a large network of human connections. Finally, possessing an ethical compass will be important as algorithm-driven machines begin to make morally weighted decisions.

  2. Look for past experience and results

  3. Decide how much and what kind of compensation you are prepared to offer, either in cash, equity or both

  4. Make it clear how long you want to engage your advisor. Is it for one hour or one year or more? Or, maybe it’s best to try before you buy and hire for a renewable three-month term.

  5. Clearly define your expectations, deliverables and timelines and how you will measure the results. What roles, holes and goals do you want your advisor to fill?

  6. Solicit candidates using networks, social media channels, word of mouth referrals or responses to a call to action on your website or other marketing collateral

  7. Screen candidates using the criteria you have defined

  8. Decide whether you want someone to fill a business or clinical advisory position. Finding a clinical business advisor is difficult since few doctors or other healthcare professionals have both a clinical and entrepreneurial mindset and the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies to help you achieve your next critical success endpoints.

  9. Agree on whether you are hiring for periodic strategic input or more tactical, hands-on execution.

  10. Interview candidates to see if they comply with your requirements and whether they are the right fit

  11. Negotiate an agreement

  12. Execute an advisory services agreement that defines the terms and conditions of the relationship

Finding the right physician advisors is an important part of recruiting your startup team. Don’t hire someone simply because of the initials after their name.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Problem Seeking 101

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Problem Seeking 101 Charles Kettering

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

When federal agencies in charge of protecting Americans’ health recommended that there should be a pause in the administration of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine, state health leaders listened and suspended its use. People may experience a mild headache after vaccination. The headaches associated with the blood clot occur one to three weeks after the shot and are more severe.

One expert recommended asking patients, “Is this like headaches you’ve had before? Or is the quality of the headache something that you’ve never experienced before?”

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?

  1. 1. Solve a problem that you already face
  2. 2. Observe a problem and solve it
  3. 3. Anticipate a problem and solve it
  4. 4. Create a problem and solve it
  5. 5. You have a personal stake in solving it
  6. 6. The 3 W’s: Will customers WANT it, is it WORTH it, can you WIN at it?

Identifying a problem starts with identifying a customer archetype that has it. Beyond guessing, identifying that person and describing their problem can only be done by talking to, working with or observing potential customers.

Doctors call it taking a pain history and documenting the chief pain complaint, the history of the present illness and their past medical history. In other words, talk to people and have them describe:

  1. Where is your pain?
  2. How bad is it?
  3. How long have you had it?
  4. On a scale of 1-10, how would you describe it?
  5. What have you done in the past to make it better?
  6. What makes it better or worse?
  7. What other problems do you have that makes the pain better or worse?
  8. How have you treated it in the past?
  9. Is the pain constant or intermittent?
  10. What would you pay to relieve the pain?

Startup geeks call this process customer discovery by “getting out of the building”. Doctors call it making house calls. Here is the ultimate list of customer discovery/development questions.

Here is a customer interview script.

Remote patient programs , for example, don’t just automatically work out. They have to be carefully planned and developed in order to gain traction and produce results. Most importantly, they have to target the right patients.

D Define and represent the problem

Primary or secondary research should give you some idea about :

  1. Market size
  2. Market growth
  3. The competitive landscape
  4. Where you intend to play
  5. What you see that others don’t.

Once you have done these things, then you can:

E Explore and experiment with possible strategies or solutions and risks involved with each by identifying customer segments and creating a value proposition canvas and a business model canvas

Here’s an into to value proposition design

When you create new value propositions and growth you need to focus on high-value customer jobs. These are not necessarily the most important jobs from your customers’ perspective. They are the most promising jobs from your perspective as a solutions provider. High-value customer jobs are characterized by the following, they are:

  • Important: When customer’s success or failure to get the job done leads to essential gains or extreme pains, respectively. Examples are managing the security risk of an ecommerce website, or designing and implementing the strategy at a company.
  • Tangible: When the pains or gains related to a job can be felt or experienced immediately or often. Examples are traffic during your daily commute, or managing a constantly overflowing email inbox.
  • Unsatisfied: When current value propositions don’t help to relieve pains or create desired gains in a satisfying way. Maybe the desired value proposition doesn’t even exist. Examples are the inexistent cure for hangovers, or calorie-free chocolate.
  • Lucrative: When many people have the job with related pains and gains or when a small number of customers are willing to pay a premium. An example of the former is listening to music on the go. An example of the latter are rare diseases for which customers or insurers are willing to pay a premium.

Here is a list of stakeholders that represent customer segments. But, job title is only one part of creating a customer persona. Here’s what Linkedin Sales Navigator won’t tell you and how to fill the gaps.

If you listen to or watch customers enough, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll discover. Here are some examples.

Don’t send out a questionnaire. Here’s why you need to interview stakeholders to identify their value factors that are most important until you get saturation.

A Act on a selected strategy or solution

L Look back and evaluate

Most businesses fail because 1) they don’t offer the right value proposition-market fit or 2) they don’t have a viable business model. Your business model canvas is anchored on your value proposition. Your value proposition (doing the job the customer wants you to do, removing the pain they have to endure to do it now and offering a product that meets or exceeds customer expectations) starts with understanding your customers. Focusing on your customers or market segments starts with those who touch the problem every day.

Design thinking describes this process i.e. understanding a problem from the customer perspective, putting yourself in their shoes by either interviewing them, watching them or experiencing what they experience. and create a range of solutions that you then design, prototype and test.

Design Thinking Diagram

Customer centered design means you have to learn how to talk to humans.

Before you do all this, though, decide whether the industry or market you decide to tackle is, the words of my friend, Tom Higley, the CEO at www.101010.net, the right founder-opportunity fit. That usually means finding independence, mastery and purpose and scratching all those psychological itches, be they pathological or not.

Perhaps the most powerful problem is one that you make personal but don’t take personally.

Here’s the problem with saying, “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.”

The education pioneer, John Dewey, said, “a problem well-put is half solved”

That happens when you arm yourself initially with the information you get from being a problem seeker, not a problem solver. Even academic scientists are getting the message.

Image credits: MisterInnovation.com, Interaction Design Foundation

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The Education Business Model Canvas

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Mission Model Canvas

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The business model canvas is one of many useful tools to design, evolve and test products and services business models. While the original model was proposed to help founders create a viable and scaleable business model, it has also helped non-profit executives, as the mission driven business model, and those looking to make a career change, using a personal business model as the Business Model You.

Personal Business Model Canvas

The construct is also useful if you are an edupreneur, trying to create and launch new educational products and services, including new courses, certificates, programs or degree offerings.

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

13. Teaching students what they need to win the 4th industrial revolution

14. Embracing cradle to career integration

15. Creating a competent diverse and equitable talent pipeline

We has seen several recent advances in edupreneurship.

Here is the boomer’s guide to teaching millenials.

The UGME steering committee recognizes that medical education programs are faced with the ubiquitous challenge of repeated calls for innovation and that, frequently, these calls do not adequately address the associated resource demands. As medical educators, we have become highly creative in identifying strategies to do more with less, but as we know, this is not a sustainable model of stewardship. In 2016 and 2017, the UGME section collaborated with the Group on Business Affairs (GBA) to explore evolving models to support and sustain UGME programming. A result of this work is the Business Model Canvas for Medical Educators. The original Business Model Canvas was proposed by Alexander Osterwalder in 2008 and has been modified over time to fit other needs. The Table of Contents will direct you to resources, including the Business Model Canvas for Medical Educators template and two examples submitted by institutions who have successfully used the template to secure funding from within their own institution.

Business Model Canvas for Medical Educators

The edupreneurship business model canvas has a few modifications to the traditional startup one:

Customer segments: The primary customer are students. However, there are many other education stakeholders, including admininstrators, alumni, donors, employers and parents. In addition, for any given subject, potential students will have different backgrounds and experience in the subject, will have different jobs they want done, and, therefore, will have different applications for what they learned, be it finding a job, getting a promotion, or adding value where they presently work.

Value proposition: For each customer segment , you have a specific value proposision. You typically describe it in the course syllabus, telling users about the intended audience, the goals of the course, the learning objectives, and the curriculum. For example, the value proposition for a course I teach to xMBA/HA students is :

This course will introduce graduate level students in healthcare administration and leadership to the principles and practice of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship defined as the pursuit of opportunity under volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous conditions with the goal of creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a valid, automatic, scaleable and time sensitive (VAST) business model.

Following completion of this course, you should be able to:

1. identify gaps in your health entrepreneurship competencies and develop a personal and professional development plan to address them

2. create an organizational culture of innovation, lead innovators and overcome the barriers to healthcare innovation dissemination and implementation

3. identify the multiple clinical and non-clinical ways to practice healthcare entrepreneurship

4. Create a plan to solve a problem inside or outside of your organization that meets the goals of the quintuple aim (Quality, cost, access, experience, waste/business operations)

5. Identify the startup life cycle and challenges at each stage

Channels: This describes how you will deliver your course. Will it be face to face, online or some hybrid model with elements of both?

Customer relationships: This describes how you will get, keep and grow the numbers of students who will take the course, e.g. promoting in the course catalog, attending a career or course proposal day, creating awareness on social media or using word or mouth dissemination from previous students.

Revenue model: This describes how your employer or you will generate revenue from the products. Traditionally, universisty based courses use a “butts in the seats” model, but COVID and new eductional technologies have radically changes the revenue generating possibilities, inluding advertising, freemium models, subscription models and others.

Key resources: This describes the human, physical, intellectual property and financial resources you will need to build, execute and scale your initiative. For example, do you want to copyright your materials, or , do you want to make them an open educational resource using a Creative Commons license?

Key activities: This what you need to do to perform and deliver on your value proposition, like what you will do using a learning management system, like create videos, run office hours, moderate asynchronous virtual discussions and design and grade exams and quizzes

Key partnerships: This describes who can help you, be they guest faculty, educational technology partners, corporate sponsors, e.g. if you are using project based learning techniques or online tools and resouce producers, e.g cases from the Harvard Business School collection.

Costs: This describes the tangible and intangible costs to produce your product. In most instances, your time, opportunity costs and effort will overshadow the monetary costs.

COVID has accelerated the pace of change in higher education, forcing them to create entrepreneurial universities. Teaching faculty how to use the education business model canvas should be part of faculty development to mimimize projecdt and product failure.

Here is what I learned, using the business model canvas, teaching sickcare innovation and entrepreneurship to first year medical students at the University of Colorado.

In this post , Steve Blank offers a new definition of why startups exist: a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

So is a new course or certificate. Use the education driven business model to make your product desireable, feasible, viable and adaptable and be sure to document your success when it comes time for your evaluation,promotion and tenure review. More likely, though, you will be including it in your failure resume, since, like the vast majority of new products, yours is likely to fail because 1) you offered a product students don’t want to buy or someone does not want to pay for, and 2) you do not have a VAST educational product business model.

Image credits: Strategyzer

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Why So Much Innoflation?

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Why So Much Innoflation?

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Inflation is all over the news and at your kitchen table. In case you cut all those economics classes, inflation happens when too much money chases too few goods. It’s happening now because of COVID variations in consumer demand, government stimulus, some fed actions and supply chain glitches. Who knew? The Goldilocks economy describes when prices are not too high, but not too low. Instead, they are just right to stimulate the growth of the economy and the standard of living.

In the midst of all this, we have been seeing a simultaneous rise in sickcare innoflation (i.e. too many overfunded startups and companies creating too few valuable products and services that don’t scale). What’s the answer?

  1. Rethink hospital-based care innovation centers
  2. Create more scalerators and euthanators instead of accelerators
  3. Involve healthcare professionals with the appropriate knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies with an entrepreneurial mindset early in the startup and product development lifecycle.
  4. Change the rules and regulations
  5. Build better ecosystems
  6. Change medical education and training
  7. Fix how we disseminate and implement sickcare solutions and make them equitably accessible.
  8. Close innovation silos
  9. Teach physician entrepreneurs how to play nice with others
  10. Change how we recruit, develop and promote sick care system of system leaders

Building back better will just get us to where we used to be. Instead, we need to create the future better to get us where we want to go. Not too much. Not too little. Just right.

Image credit: Pixabay

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