Andrew Gaule, founder of the Corven Corporate Venturing Network, talks to Naomi Fried, chief innovation officer, Boston Children’s Hospital
Gaule: Give a brief description of your role.
Fried: I am Boston Children’s Hospital’s first chief innovation officer and I lead the innovation acceleration programme. We were formed in 2010 and the mission of our innovation acceleration programme is to enhance the innovation culture within the organisation with the aim of accelerating innovation in the delivery of care. We take a three-pronged approach to achieving our mission of enhancing the innovation culture. First, we are trying to support grass-roots innovation so helping people test and develop new ideas. Second, we are working on strategic innovation initiatives at the institutional level. Finally, we are keeping an eye out for innovation opportunities and trying to catalyse work and get folk innovating around problems that exist.
Gaule: What is unique about your innovation programme?
Fried: Not many innovation programme healthcare providers have a chief innovation officer. Beyond that we are quite unique in our focus on supporting internal innovation, and building the innovation culture and recognising there are so many good ideas and opportunities within our institution and that we can do a great deal to drive innovation by supporting our stakeholders.
Gaule: What trends in technologies and business models are you seeing in the health sector?
Fried: There is a great deal of focus on enhanced efficiency and driving down cost. Healthcare has become very expensive to deliver and it should not be that way, so there is a lot of interest and activity around efficiency.
At the same time we are recognising how important the patient experience is beyond just the delivery of care with the other non-clinical aspects of the way we interact with our patients. So there is a lot of emphasis in the industry today on the patient experience.
How I see this playing out practically is a strong interest in leveraging digital tools and embracing the digital transformation we are currently engaged in, for clinicians to use tools that can help doctors and nurses do their job more efficiently, and also tools that face the patients, also recognising that there are so many new digital solutions that can help us engage our patients and help them achieve better health.
One of the big drivers and trends in the industry today is telehealth, the remote delivery of care. There is a recognition that the patient does not always have to come to the doctor for care, that we can leverage technologies like the cellphone and the computer to provide virtual care and deliver care to patients wherever they are. Telehealth is really a more efficient way to deliver care. It is cheaper and has the benefit of enhancing the patient experience as it is much more convenient to stay home and receive care than having to go to the doctor or the clinic.
Gaule: How do you engage the staff at Boston Children’s Hospital in innovation and collaboration?
Fried: We are very interested in educating folk about innovation and we run a quarterly bootcamp – a two-hour work-shop where we introduce the concept of innovation and innovation lifecycle, give people a framework for thinking about how innovation happens in the healthcare environment. We then share the resources available in the hospital, and we bring in some seasoned innovators to tell their war stories.
We are also interested in promoting the innovation community so we have monthly innovator forums where someone comes and shares what they are working on with the larger community and gets input. We also have an online platform for people to share what they are working on and find other innovators. We are also focused on giving innovators the chance to be recognised and acknowledged for the wonderful work that they do. We had an innovators day when 19 innovators presented their work in a forum style. We have a showcase coming up which will be a science fair structure where innovators are at tables talking about what they are working on.
We think that once we have educated people about innovation, and are building the community, then we have the opportunity to promote our resources and find that people come forward and embrace the opportunity to innovate at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Gaule: How do you overcome resistance to change?
Fried: We see resistance when we go to implement or operationalise innovation, so there is not a lot of resistance in the first couple of phases, ideation or piloting, or when you are doing things on a small scale. But once you try to scale up from pilot to broad operationalisation, that is when you find a barrier. I call that challenge the operationalisation gap (o-gap) and every institution has this challenge. There are a lot of ways to close the o-gap. You can change management resources, use education, re-engage leadership, but probably the most important thing is for innovators to recognise that the o-gap exists and engage stakeholders early in the innovation lifecycle, getting them involved in ideation, piloting and so on.
Gaule: We did a study on innovation stress points a couple of years ago, which people can access from the Corven Networks Research Library. Partnering is seen as an important aspect in bringing these things together – people, technology and business models. How are you partnering investors?
Fried: We are doing a lot to support grass-roots innovation. We have a seed fund where innovators can apply for funding and to date we have supported 33 projects. We also have another mechanism to support grass-roots innovation – our Fast-track Innovation and Technology (Fit) award for people who want to develop new critical software or mobile apps. When they win a Fit award they get time with our development team. Our development team helps them build out a proof of concept, and pilot that mobile app or piece of clinical software. We have done seven projects to date through Fit award.
We actually have a rich pipeline of projects. I will not tell you that all of them have been successful but some of them have been. And where we are really looking to partner investors is in spinning out some of the ideas that we have tested and have been successful. As our ideas mature, and when we have data and we know we have a winner in the clinical environment, we want to find partners that can help us license these ideas or support spin-out companies that want to commercialise some of these wins we have demonstrated.
Gaule: When you are not investing, what do you do for interest?
Fried: I love to read – it is not very innovative but very relaxing. I also like folk dance and I hang out with my kids. I also like to hit the road – I like travelling, which is very stimulating and a great source of ideas, and also rejuvenating.
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