Converting biologists, one step at a time.
An ideology or principles driven approach tends to lead to a failure to identify a market need.
A populist, ear to the ground, approach will find a better market, but may (i) fail to build a product, (ii) not deliver on real-world objectives.
There is always a tension. Know where you are on the spectrum and where your potential blindspots may lie.
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
My thoughts on hiring have evolved a lot.
I used to hire from the perspective of effectively mentoring the candidates into the role. This does not scale. And any payoff comes far too late.
What I have learned the hard way:
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
Be normal. You cannot risk being an outlier in all aspects of your business.
Your responsibility is to minimise the overall risk without killing the potential upside.
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
IDEO – the people behind design thinking – have a wonderful model for product innovation. It’s called the three lenses of innovation. A good product opportunity must be:
In health-tech the same three lenses apply but there is a clear priority ranking.
Always start with Desirable. What is the evidence that anybody wants this product?
The next cheapest question to address is financial viability. Can you make money from selling this product?
Technical feasibility comes last. It has huge financial overheads and consumes too much time.
For every rule there is an exception: I have had projects where the clinical need was so overwhelmingly obvious the only real question was whether technology had developed to the point of presenting a solution. That said, we did also address the desirability and feasibility topics in parallel.
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
Many entrepreneurs are excellent sales people. Part of good selling is allowing the customer to paint their own vision onto your offering.
However, most entrepreneurs fail to bring a product to market because they are describing a different product to each of their stakeholders.
Write your product descriptions down!
Make your offer precise.
Use shared whiteboards and pitch decks.
Ask for critique. Invite critique. Do not shoot the messenger, they are your ally.
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
There are at least three levels in any endeavour:
Know your level!
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
I have been distracted by doing rather than writing for the past year. While this is likely to continue, I did have time to make a lot of notes on Innovation, particularly in my own field of machine learning and healthcare. So for the next few months I will post one innovation snippet per week.
These snippets are very similar in format to those presented by Seth Godin or Bernadette Jiwa. This means that I won’t go into too much explanatory details. I was hoping to put them together into a small book, but for now I just offer them as is here on this blog.
[This article is part of the Innovation Snippets series]
I began this blog almost exactly three years ago. My goal was two-fold: first, to demonstrate thought leadership in an area in which I was then founding a company; and, second, to have a demonstrated track-record rather than a picture-perfect pitch-deck. This latter is clearly a sub-goal of the first.
In those early days, I began a series of articles on Mathematics and Biology. I began with a comparison of the two fields. From there I moved on to discussing the people and skills involved, essentially why mathematicians so rarely do biology. I then discussed the outlier which is bioinformatics. I had two further articles planned in the series, after which point I wanted to attempt a synthesis. The missing articles are on the Microbiome and Quantitative Systems Pharmacology (QSP). These will remain missing articles for now, time has moved on and my thoughts on all of these topics have progressed enormously.
A few weeks ago I published a futurecast about using virtual patient’s for pharma drug development. There was a key idea buried in that article which in essence is my current synthesis perspective on mathematics and biology. I want to highlight this idea here and flesh it out slightly.
Continue reading “Mathematics and Biology (the Pharma Vision)”I have been writing a lot in the past 12 months and most of it has not appeared on this blog. My output on the blog is reduced as a result but this is normal. Writing is tiring.
About 18 months ago I left my second start-up Fosanis, slightly burnt-out and paradoxically highly-motivated.
Continue reading “Writing is tiring”Over the past two weeks I have presented two future-casts. The first involves the ubiquitous appearance of AGI inside of ten years. The second concerns the tipping-point appearance of a Virtual Patient for drug development. This week is the third and final installment of the deep-tech incubation game.
I think we will have an Excel for Data Science within the next 3-5 years.
Continue reading “Three things I know: Future-casting 3 of 3”