Humble Takeaways From Open Innovation In Health Pop-Up JPM 2020

The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is one of the largest health investment gatherings in the industry, drawing as many as 9,000 attendees. The high density of human, intellectual, and financial capital are among the many reasons we returned to host the 2nd annual Open Innovation in Health Pop-Up at JP Morgan 2020 in San Francisco.

The San Francisco Health Pop-Up, in partnership with Mount Sinai Innovation Partners and Ogilvy Consulting, is the latest in a series of events that feature a curated list of participants ranging from startups to enterprises and investors from across the globe. Previous cities include New York, Philly, and London.

Attendees made meaningful connections and paid close attention to the enlightening discussions on stage. The panelists provided perspectives from various stages and sectors of the health ecosystem. Below are a few top themes humble ventures took away from the event:

Bring External Partners Into Internal Innovation

You cannot do this alone. Everybody has something to bring to the table.

Some of the biggest challenges you face inside corporate innovation is sexy money, but it’s not the lack of funds; it’s having too much of it.

Sometimes innovation can move at a glacial pace. Collaborations and partnerships can speed it up.

Have A Startup Mentality

Healthcare innovation is in the hands of startups. And it’s not because startups have these new ideas that nobody else has it’s because they have a different mentality of how to approach solving problems.

It’s not saying that only startups can solve problems, but we have to think like a startup if we want to do that inside a large organization.

Different mentalities, meeting the needs of other people and understanding that the status quo is not going to solve the problems of tomorrow.

Being an entrepreneur is about creating optionality.

Create Impact And Not Just Vanity Metrics

Generate data that shows the impact of your technology against the mission that you’re aiming to serve.

There are a lot more companies, startups, and just a lot more people looking at social determinants of health as a way to supplement the data they have from a clinical standpoint. The social determinants of health are going to be a much more significant part of how we assess data for patients going forward.

Navigate And Steward Innovation Better

When we find a solution, the startup has we tend to kind of guide them in a way that they develop according to our needs, which may be essential and gets them one customer, but in the long run, it’s a distraction for them and takes them away from the original vision.

Not every startup is well-funded with a long runway that can do stuff without getting paid, or even have an in-house legal person to do things. Yet, when we want to work with them, we put them through our contracting procurement process, and it takes nine months to get a contract in place, and they run out of money because of their legal fees to get it done. So, we set up, what we call, a legal field to work with startups specifically to shorten that timeframe from nine months to nine weeks or less so that we can try and get those contracts.

We have to assess the risk and realize that if they’re not building something that’s being launched right away and that the risk isn’t the same as when you’re contracting a big multi-billion-dollar company, then the contracting should reflect that. You should work with them to understand how you can get an agreement in place.

We needed to show them how our technology would be on par with what they were doing today in terms of a risk perspective but had clear benefits. Identifying that was not an easy process.

There are signers, and there are champions. You need both.

Explore White Space

In healthcare, there’s a pretty limited governor on creativity and what can happen, and white space allows us to go there willingly. So with white space, we look at creativity and equal opportunities.

White space allows us to explore and even get out of the industry into some reasonable and unlikely pursuits.

Areas Of Interest

Some of the areas that we’re focused on right now are in clinical innovation. It’s easy actually to get the genetic test done. The question is, what do you do with it when you have results.

Everything is about patient benefits. Identifying and engaging broadly with our community creating a robust, scalable infrastructure, is really to help drive the development of commercially relevant innovation to benefit patients.

It is implementing creative, innovative solutions that create a more holistic care experience and, ultimately, better outcomes.

Identify The Problem And Cadence For Solution

We’re continually being contacted by companies that have this solution for either a problem that we don’t have or problems that we aren’t ready to solve right now because there are more significant problems.

It’s imperative to understand ultimately who the customer is and what the capability is before you start trying to create a company or pitch them.

One of the things that we are doing on the innovation side is we’re pulling all of the key stakeholders together to help us think about what are real opportunities. And helping us to identify what are the most critical, unmet needs that we can solve.

Advancing Science Through Programming

In the past, the science of medicine was a very research-focused internal innovation-focused approach. Today, a lot of the most exciting innovation in healthcare is happening in startups.

A wrong way to spend four weeks with us would be to be doing a sales pitch for 12 weeks.

What’s most urgently addressing the needs, I have now? A solution that is ready to go is something that solves a huge issue that we’re facing right now. Those are the ones that are most popular for our stakeholders to say yes.

Navigating The Healthsystem

When someone’s got an exciting idea, whether it’s a basic research lab or something on the clinical side, the question is, are you talking to the people that can support and take you to the next level?

Some medical professionals are overworked, and they have no time. So we have to be the Sherpas so we can navigate the system to help them out.

You have to create a very systematic pipeline for bringing innovations or new solutions into a healthcare organization. Otherwise, you overload your senior clinical enterprise.

Consumerization Of Health

Consumerization of healthcare is increasingly more tech-enabled, which is what the consumers usually want more and more of. From on-demand to the convenience of care, to setting it up appointments seamlessly, and to understanding complex insurance packages.

I’m looking for vendors that are giving consumers the power to manipulate themselves. That’s probably the scariest thing for a lot of people, and it’s not just the healthcare companies, it’s the food companies, it’s a whole lot of entrenched interests, but it’s a vast market.

I think we, as consumers, have convenience, access, education, and learnings at our fingertips; we’re going to push very hard on the healthcare system. If we go back 100 years where doctors were making house calls, we’re actually at a time again where doctors can make house calls, and especially with the population, we have with the baby boomers aging. Getting out of the home can be a real difficulty for them, whether it’s for money or transportation or health. I think it’s an exciting time from that standpoint.

Innovation is seeing something in a different context, and the contextual challenge and the risk of that I think are what the biggest saboteur is for us.

Health Technology And The Forecast For 2020

Anybody working on any technology that could be useful or potentially commercializable flows through our office and our office’s job is to vet that to help shape it to add resources to develop it if you can, and then push it out to the marketplace.

There’s been an explosion of digital health-related technologies in the past five years or so, and for us to differentiate between them and understand what’s the real value proposition over somebody else, sometimes it’s not so easy.

Sometimes we’ll run challenges and competitions that we feel there’s an area where there’s not enough exploration. We’ve done blockchain challenges, we’ve done AI challenges, and we’ve done all kinds of things to try to get people playing in the sandbox for healthcare.

For more information about upcoming programming, or if you’d like to partner with us, contact start@humble.vc.