« June 2006 |
Main
| August 2006 »
Thanks to BIF Research Advisor Larry Huston for spending some quality time with me last week. As I sit here preparing the output from our conversation to share with the BIF community, I'm reminded of a reference he made to a Wall Street Journal article about public/private partnerships and what it takes to make them successful. It comes down to baby steps.
Here at BIF, we've set ourselves up with a hefty goal to transform how value is delivered across several key sectors of the economy-from education to healthcare to public security. According to Huston, the end result may indeed be transformational, but it's important to begin on a small scale.
"Begin by jumping on the learning curve," said Huston. "Get a few people trained to translate the program into briefs and actionable targets. Then get in touch with other people who might solve the problem, find a way to interact with them, share in the rewards and launch into marketplace. Then reap the success, re-do the cycle and continue to scale it up, up, up until you have something big and important happening. But always start small."
Must be human nature, but most people don't have the intuitive sense to start small and they certainly don't have the patience for baby step building blocks . But Huston's successful Connect & Develop innovation program did not happen overnight. It was years in the making before the program officially launched in 2001. And it's been years of learning and growing before his story was ready for primetime.
Getting back to the Wall Street Journal article, Cincinnati has developed a program called Every Child Succeeds. In the seven counties around the city, 8.3 out of every 1,000 newborns die before they reach their first birthday. For the group of mothers part of Every Child, the mortality rate is 2.8.
From the article:
(The program) is built on a tough, corporate model inspired by a former chief of one of America's most successful companies, Cincinnati's Procter & GAmble. Every Child, a partnership of public and private groups, has relatively narrow goals and is run to produce specific results -- rarities in the world of government-run health services. All told, it suggests a new way to reduce America's infant-mortality rate.
The point of babysteps is not just about starting small. There are many examples of small, inspiring and successful programs across the country. To Larry's point, it's also about having the ability to scale-up, on a repeated basis, until one day, you can look back, without hype, and describe your efforts as 'transformational'.
And that's the value of organizations like BIF. By leveraging Rhode Island's size and densely connected networks, we provide the platform for scalability. Our members easily reach a diverse population of just over one million within a footprint of a thousand square miles. We provide streamlined access to government, community, academic, and industry leaders.The potential for national and global expansion starts here.
Enough of the soapbox. Proof is in the 'do'. And you can check out what we're up to here.
Posted July 21, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
| Comments (0)
After two weeks now working on the BIF studio project, group goals are becoming more clarified, group dynamic more revealed, and the mountain of information to be examined, organized and applied continues to grow. I think we're off to a great start.
The abstract goals that have been presented to our group are becoming slightly more defined as we research, present and interview. However, we're still wandering, hands outstretched, through a fog of information overload. But hey, I figure if we can survive the sub-zero temperatures of the erratic 6th floor air-conditioning unit, we can probably find our way out of a little fog.
So far the biggest challenges to arise have been the interviews and the research. I find it difficult to remember to take everything into account during an interview. You don't just listen to what the interviewee says, you're studying their movements through the space, the organization of things around them, their facial expressions and their tone of voice. Every detail is a clue to a potential problem, and solution. I really have to train myself to think this way. My first interview with a physician who began her own private practice was inspiring. I felt like if one person could take it upon herself to correct the system, and make personal sacrifices to do so, the potential for widespread change is a reality. She took it upon herself to leave the system that rushed her interactions with her patients. She then organized her own practice around being able to spend time with each of her patients, and building personal relationships with them by listening to their problems, truly considering all possibilities, and then helping them through follow-up care. Not one of her patients could get lost in the system. After this interview, I realized that there are, in fact experts on how to get it right, when it comes to healthcare, and how they can act as our allies through this project.
As for the research, our class as a whole has learned quite a bit already, if we could share a brain, we would without a doubt, be unstoppable. As an individual, I've found it to be necessary to accept that there is no way I can become an expert on the health care industry within 8 weeks. At the same time however, the research is fascinating and my medical vocabulary is expanding. I'm excited to about the possibility of affecting the Rhode Island healthcare system after presenting what we find when this project is completed.
Posted July 19, 2006 by Jackie Guido | Permalink
| Comments (0)
The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) and the Rhode Island School of Design have embarked on a unique effort to understand and improve a pivotal piece in the healthcare puzzle: the interaction between patients and primary care physicians.
The BIF/RISD Healthcare Innovation Project will leverage the expertise of industrial, architectural, and graphic designers, interviews with patients and primary care providers, and feedback from stakeholders in the Rhode Island healthcare system to create a detailed visualization of how patients experience the primary care system.
This project isn't about logging hours in a research library: Healthcare Innovation Project participants will directly observe patients and doctors in real-life primary care situations. Through observation and interviews, participants will capture a snapshot of the primary care interaction taken from the patient's perspective—a perspective not well represented in most conversations about health care innovation.
The eight-week experience will be led by the Rhode Island School of Design's Charlie Cannon and Michael Lye and managed through BIF's Patient Experience Laboratory, BIF's platform for exploring innovative, patient-centered health care solutions.
BIF is committed to capturing and sharing information and insights generated throughout all stages of the BIF/RISD Healthcare Innovation Project. Project leaders and participants will document the project—including both the experience and the outcomes—though publicly available weekly reports.
Findings from the Healthcare Innovation Project will be presented at BIF's Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 4-5, 2006.
More information about the project can be found here.
Posted July 17, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
| Comments (0)
Anyone see the cover of the New York Times yesterday? Headline: Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor. This is big news. A team led by Brown University researcher and BIF-2 storyteller John Donoghue actually turned thoughts into action. Their results, published in this month's Nature, show how a tiny new brain sensor allowed a quadriplegic to open a prosthetic hand, control a robotic limb and move a computer cursor – using thoughts alone.
Beyond being just so darn cool, Donoghue's accomplishment represents collaborative innovation in action. Fellow BIF-2 storyteller Frans Johansson calls it 'The Medici Effect'- a convergence among disciplines reflective of an increasingly interconnected world where concepts that appear to be unrelated actually are related.
Johansson, who wrote about Donoghue's experiment back when the guinea pigs were rhesus monkeys, says,
This story is especially compelling not just because of what the team of scients discovered, but also because it was a result of a deliberate effort to find an intersection of disciplines. The group behind this particular breakthrough consisted of mathematicians, medical doctors, neuroscientists and computer scientists, all playing crucial rolls in understanding how the brain works.
For Donoghue and his team, their discovery could not have happened without embracing a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to experimentation. Frankly, I can't wait to hear him share his story at our summit in October.
Related Links: Head here for more details on John Donoghue's discovery. And for more information about BIF-2 visit here.
Posted July 14, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
| Comments (0)
