Three essential drivers of healthcare innovation
At Generali Health Solutions
COVID-19 is accelerating the need to adopt innovative solutions in all industries, but most especially in healthcare. One company, however, was already ahead of the curve. Read more below about this successful corporate venture, Generali Health Solutions, in our interview with Dr Markus Homann.
This interview was originally conducted for our new book “Das Entscheidende Jahrzehnt”. If you would like to read the full story follow the link and get your version of “Das Entscheidende Jahrzehnt” now.
Generali Health Solutions was ahead of the curve when this venture began a few years ago. Emerging from one of the world’s leading insurance operators, the Generali Group, the company committed to finding and addressing gaps in our healthcare system. Functioning independently from their parent corporation and in the start-up style associated with venture building, Generali Health Solutions (GHS) offers health programs, rather than insurance, to companies, insurers, and institutions.
Filling a specific niche, GHS aims to address chronic health problems with the goal of increasing employee health and satisfaction and reducing productivity losses and treatment costs. For example, the main culprits of employee absences include back pain, mental problems and sleep issues. In the long run, these conditions can hugely affect work productivity and quality, which add up to considerable costs for employers. GHS’s programs, which are continuously reviewed for effectiveness, identify optimal personalized plans for conditions that fall through the cracks in standard healthcare, and they connect employees to these plans through “intelligent linking of online and offline solutions.”
According to Markus Homann, the managing director at GHS, the need for digital innovation in healthcare has only grown more pressing since the pandemic. He expanded on this further, detailing the company’s progressive and now aggressive direction towards effectively replacing physical health solutions with predominantly telemedicine solutions in order to “radically redefine communication with customers.”
Between his doctorate in Health Economics from the University of Mannheim, a master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University, and a variety of experience in the insurance industry, Homann possesses a keen awareness of how difficult it is to affect real and lasting change in healthcare. This made him the perfect individual to ask our favourite question here at FoundersLane:
What’s needed to make corporate innovation work?
Homann’s answer could be distilled into three critical drivers of innovation: Culture, Diversity, and Freedom.
1) Culture
“You need a strong culture to hold people together and to create motivation that goes in one direction.”
Always learning, reviewing and updating towards what their customers need is a challenge that keeps GHS to a standard of continuously striving forward. This standard helps foster a culture, one which is now empowering them to push towards telemedicine and other innovative solutions.
Homann credits the company’s dedication to creating a better and more holistic healthcare system as entrepreneurial glue. “We pride ourselves in knowing what is best for patients,” he says, and this patient-oriented culture offers direction as the team continues to identify deficits in healthcare and search out strategies to facilitate improved patient journeys.
2) Diversity
“To do something really valuable you need many different perspectives.”
While “diversity is relatively new to the insurance world,” as an industry-adjacent entity Homann considers diversity to be one of their most important assets. In his opinion, there is an imperative need to have an “expert in every field” in order to really pioneer innovation. In direct contrast to the insurance industry’s usual format of two key players (“the actuary builds something, and the salesperson sells it”), Homann believes that startups should utilize experts in numerous fields to better identify customer needs as well as new channels for communication.
New perspectives also help challenge the assumptions of slow-moving industries such as healthcare and insurance. Homann observes that “diversity continually creates an experience of ‘things work differently than I thought they would,’ and that is very, very important for the attitude of people towards innovation.” Moreover, innovation is needed not only in the health solutions, but in the business and sales models as well, and this also requires diverse expertise and entrepreneurial ingenuity.
3) Freedom
“If you don’t get the freedom to exercise your expertise and your passion, then don’t do it.”
While funding generally comes with strings attached, the more freedom a venture has, the more it has “space to manoeuvre.” “Yes, I would say fight for freedom,” advises Homann, “that’s the most important thing.” He further recommends avoiding wasting time on “over-reporting” and being careful with deadlines, asserting that “In other companies, I’ve seen deadlines kill many innovative ideas.”
Homann feels strongly on this point and urges ventures to “make no compromises in fighting for the time and the resources that you need to do your job,” because in the end, “success will be judged on by patients and customers and they will not care about how hard it was for you to get there.”
Freedom paired with the right team and a progressive culture is the perfect combination to propel innovation. These three drivers are essential to corporate innovation and can push companies towards the front line of digital health innovation.
At FoundersLane, we work with corporations to pair the best of their assets with the speed and ingenuity of entrepreneurs to create digital business models that affect real change in healthcare. To find out more, read our book “Das Entscheidende Jahrzehnt” or get in touch.
FoundersLane, the leading Corporate Venture Builder for climate and health, was founded in 2016 by Felix Staeritz, Andreas von Oettingen, and Michael Stephanblome. The team develops digital business models in the health and climate sector by combining the agility and the mindset of technology entrepreneurs with the strength of corporations. FoundersLane draws on more than 20 years of experience by the founders in building up new companies.
FoundersLane creates new, fast-growing digital companies in categories that are highly topical and current. FoundersLane counts more than 100 founders, experts and entrepreneurs with great expertise in the fields of medicine, health, climate, disruptive technologies such as IoT connectivity, AI, and machine learning. Clients and partners include SMEs and corporations as well as more than 30 Forbes listed companies, such as Trumpf, Vattenfall, Henkel and Baloise. FoundersLane is active in Europe, MENA and Asia with offices in Berlin, Cologne, Vienna and London.
Felix Staeritz is a serial entrepreneur, investor, founder and CEO of the corporate venture builder FoundersLane, member of the Board of Digital Leaders of the World Economic Forum and book author and is one of the internationally recognised experts on entrepreneurship and digital transformation. Driven by the firm conviction to sustainably improve the world through digital innovations, he has been in close dialogue with the global business and scientific elite in relevant international bodies for around 20 years.
Dr Sven Jungmann is a doctor-turned-entrepreneur. He is a partner at FoundersLane and an advisor to health start-ups and investors. Handelsblatt listed him among Germany’s smartest innovators. Sven has consulted Wellster Healthtech, the D2C health success case in Germany and continues doing so via an advisory board role. Wellster Healthtech has been promoting D2C in health early on.
