TEDMED: Finding, activating the best innovations

“Anyone who follows big ideas has that sense of unrealized potential,” said Juan Enriquez, managing director of Excel Venture Management, during a panel discussion on innovation at TEDMED. Big ideas have become a real part of the mainstream culture in the past decade, he said. "At Big Think (an online collaborative), we’ve been trying to drill down on this and isolate action-oriented ideas and bring them to life in day-to-day life."

Enriquez talked about how MIT in Cambridge, Mass., has several buildings within a few blocks devoted to start-ups, neuroscience, biology and one of the largest gene factories in the world. “One to two percent of the future world economy is going to come out of that corner.”

A panel of people involved in innovation and start-up companies discussed how they have been successful in curating big ideas. Nina Nashif, founder and CEO of start-up incubator Healthbox, said, when looking for a good idea, “nuance trumps need. There are a lot of solutions in the industry and a lot of needs. It’s important for entrepreneurs to understand the complexities of the industry. In healthcare, the buyer and the user are not always the same individuals so figuring out who to approach is often really hard. Entrepreneurs need to put their solutions in context and industry needs to think about how they source solutions differently.”

Josh Stein, CEO and co-founder of AdhereTech, which makes pill bottles designed to improve medication adherence, said innovation means thinking about the needs in the general economy and designing a product around those needs. His cloud-connected pill bottles were developed after reviewing non-adherence studies.

Giovanni Colella, MD, MBA, co-founder and CEO of Castlight Health, discussed two things that have to happen for innovation to succeed: The right social structure that allows entrepreneurs to grow—“a free market enterprise mentality.” And then you need “a bunch of weird people that are unemployable. They have no idea what they really want to do but they want to do something big. These are the guys who will succeed.” Marry those two with the right investors, Colella said. “When those three things come together, innovation will happen one way or another.”

Michael Weintraub, president and CEO of Humedica, added, “The key to innovation is to build something because you really want to build it, not because you want to build it so you can sell it. ... If you really want to build something of sustainable value, build it to create a sustainable entity. Innovation requires things you can control and at least 51 percent luck.” Weintraub said the idea really matters and the best ones are driven by the customers and the marketplace. “You need to understand the dynamic in the industry and evaluate the force, whether it’s technology, big data or the economics of reimbursement.”

Going forward, “we’re seeing probably the biggest change in healthcare since 1935 when employer-covered health insurance started,” said Colella. “We’ve come to the point that the U.S. healthcare system is unsustainable. When consumers pay more and more out of pocket, that’s a signal that the market is changing to a consumer-driven market,” he continued.

“We’re trying to be a catalyst of change,” said Nashif. “We need the industry to think differently about innovation and view the solutions available in different ways. Managing risk for large organizations is about being realistic about what you want to accomplish.” She cited the innovation work of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. “As committed as they are to supporting innovation in Boston, they need to be realistic on how they can work with companies. Start small and set expectations on both sides.”