Entrepreneurship is Not a Spectator Sport: Networking Your Way to An Opportunity
Dr. Renée Arnold, President & CEO of Arnold Consultancy & Technology, has realized throughout her career that one should take advantage of meeting opportunities — chance or otherwise. Here, she shares her tips for networking.
I enjoy the reality show American Ninja Warrior. Have you seen it? It’s when rookies string together a series of feats to get to the final goal of hitting a buzzer and, ultimately, if they beat enough competitors, of making a lot of money and gaining notoriety for their athleticism and chutzpah. Networking is kind of like that — using one step or one experience or one meetup to get to the next level. So, how do you facilitate and benefit from these encounters?
1. Sign up for an online entrepreneur’s meetup through Eventbrite or other medium in your career field. You might be introduced to a company that sees your expertise as key for one of their clients. In my case, this led to an Entrepreneur-in-Residence position with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), helping entrepreneurs convince insurers to reimburse for their technologies by using health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) methodologies.
2. Put yourself out there. Early in my career, I was at a conference in North Carolina and a panel of health insurers was criticizing the use of models to demonstrate cost-effectiveness of therapeutic options as black boxes not to be trusted. At the microphone, when I asked if transparency in the models couldn’t give the insurers more confidence in their model use and results, they shot me down. Dr. Marilyn Dix Smith, the eventual Executive Director and Founder of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR), the preeminent global scientific organization dedicated to HEOR, came up to me at a break and asked if I would like to co-found ISPOR, which I and 38 others proceeded to do. Twenty-five years later, we are a global organization of 20,000+ people.
3. Attend social events at conferences. It’s not just for the knowledge, it’s to meet people — see and be seen. At one of these events, a man came up to me and asked if I would like to be on an ISPOR panel on open source modeling during an upcoming meeting because Dr. Michael Drummond, one of the most renown health economists in the world, had told him of my expertise in the field. This panel appearance led me to develop an Open Source Model Special Interest Group, which now boasts approximately 200 members, within ISPOR. In fact, I had approached Dr. Drummond 25 years ago to be ISPOR’s first plenary speaker and he has been a friend and mentor ever since.
Networking is about constantly reinventing oneself and encouraging others to do the same. It is having the passion and energy to engage in thought leadership, which can lead to acknowledgement of your expertise, but leave you open to criticism. However, as my father always said, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So, get out of your comfort zone and network yourself to an opportunity.
Renée JG Arnold is currently President & CEO, Arnold Consultancy & Technology, LLC, where she oversees outcomes research and develops affiliated software for pharmaceutical and government programs. Her special interest in evidence-based health derives from her research that deals with use of technology to collect and/or model real-world data for use in rational decision-making by healthcare practitioners and policy makers. She is also Adjunct Professor, Master of Public Health program, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, where she has developed and teaches the pharmacoeconomics coursework.
Dr. Arnold completed her undergraduate training at the University of Maryland and received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also completed a post-doctoral residency at University Hospital in San Diego/University of California at San Francisco School of Pharmacy. Dr. Arnold is a founding member of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and is the Chair of multiple special interest groups there. Dr. Arnold is an author of numerous articles, book chapters and books in the areas of pharmacology, pharmacoeconomics and cost containment strategies and recently published the 2nd edition of her pharmacoeconomics textbook.
