hospital impact

by Tony Chen

This past week, I was at the Front End of Innovation Conference in Boston. Overall, it was a great time to reflect on my own mindset about how to bring innovation to hospitals & healthcare.

Here are a few things & quotes I'm still mulling over:

On Being Customer-Focused
- A.G. Lafley (P&G CEO) had a ton of great insight. When asked about how P&G became so customer-centric, he recalled his first days on the job as CEO. "We were all so busy every day, so much so that our heads were in our phones/computers and our behinds were facing our customers." First thing he did was to get people out of their offices and into customer's lives and watch them.
- Google does this as well. One "problem" they deal with is that they work pretty hard, have a great campus that almost allows employees not to leave. Employees start living in a "google bubble" and "googlers are not necessarily representative of the general population." Google continuously sends teams out to watch people do searches and use their products in their "natural" environments.

On Humans
- I know this sounds cliche or stupid, but we're human. And humans are emotional and experiential. The most beloved products/services in the world just happen to treat us that way.
- Apple isn't selling a high-tech device, Apple is selling a human experience
- A.G. Lafley: "we have to understand what customers can't articulate." Customers might be able to express what they dislike, but they won't necessarily be able to tell you why or how to fix it.
- Peter Guber (Mandalay) - storytelling has been the key to his success, and the key to the success of just about everyone he knows (in entertainment or not). When you can tell a good story (about yourself, your product, your cause, your goal), it resonates with people emotionally and memorably. Good storytelling is not informational, it's emotional - it engages the heart and the mind.

On the Future
- Ray Kurzweil (Ridiculously accurate futurist on all things tech and IT) believes in the theory of the "law of the accelerating returns." The reality of innovation and of human history is that things don't progress linearly, things progress exponentially. That's because every new innovation we come up with accelerates the next innovation. Just think about "Moore's Law" - a "doubling every two years." Check out his work here and here
- Exponential growth and linear growth are hard to distinguish in the early years (because the numbers are so small). But the turning point (the bend on the hockey stick) is hitting us now in the areas such as solar energy (within 5 years, solar energy will be cheaper than fossil-fuel energy) and reverse engineering the human brain (15 years, we'll have ridiculously real AI)
- Devices won't be laptops or PDAs - devices will be in our clothes, in our heads, in our bodies. Sound crazy? There are 50 studies being done right now in animals on implantable devices. One has cured diabetes in rats. One is an in-blood device that finds and destroys cancer cells.
- We can learn about innovation from the one obvious place no one really looks: nature. Why? Because every single organism has been an innovator for billions of years in order to survive (99% of all species are extinct) We can take advantage of those billions of years of "market testing" by reverse engineering nature. Check out some examples here.

As I said, I'm still mulling over what this all means. In general, I think I tend to overestimate what innovation will bring in the short-term, but greatly underestimate what innovation will bring in the long-term. New innovations are accelerating and will vastly change the landscape of healthcare as we know it. Hospitals that go out on a limb and catch the wave will have to take big risks but also stand to reap tremendous rewards.