For six months now, I have been producing an innovation snippets series.
I know I have some email subscribers who have been surprised at my output in the past six month (Hi Ronan!). Partly, it was surprising that I chose to publish on this topic given my time commitments elsewhere, and partly it was surprising as I tend to have a much stronger interest in heavy technical questions and a focus on product-market fit in healthcare.
I have spent the past five plus years deeply involved in medical innovation. My first startup was in pharma R&D, and my second was an innovative approach to delivering behavioural therapy to oncology patients. Since leaving Fosanis, I have spent over three years publishing academic articles on how to do medical AI products, and in mentoring a rather large number of startups working in this space.
I realise that I do not want to become a lifelong coach. Nor am I likely to publish a book on entrepreneurship. But I have been systematically gathering my insights over these past years and if the opportunity ever presents I do intend to publish them – that is just not my principal path.
In June 2022 I accepted a full time job for the first time in my career. Part of that role might have required me to develop content for courses on innovation in AI. Prior to beginning in that role I was faced with the obvious problem – I have a lot of content ready to go, I was not hired on the basis of having that content, indeed my employer did not even know that I had it at the point where they hired me, so how do I maintain ownership here?
We came up with an internal process for handling this issue. But my backstop solution was to publish the insights in their rawest form here on my blog. I typed them all up prior to taking up my employment and programmed their subsequent appearance according to a weekly publishing schedule.
What next?
I like the insights, but I dislike what they are doing to my blog.
I use this domain as my principal domain for my professional life and this is lowering my value. It is hiding that I am actually a technical expert who, in addition, works well with humans.
I will revert to publishing on more concrete topics. But I am bandwidth limited so, as a consequence, I will be forced to publish less often.
If it does not make the blog look bad then I will continue to intersperse innovation insights when time and space allow.