No More Innovation: Only Results
Boards of Directors in all sectors are slashing innovation budgets in the current economic environment. If your company or industry needs innovation, or you are an innovator; What should you do?
In healthcare, we MUST innovate to address exploding requirements in both cybersecurity and AI. The latter two hinge on many overlapping skills.
I would suggest that effective immediately, we consider banning the word innovation from our own vocabularies. (after this article ;). Most people don’t like innovation and creativity and the current economy is the best excuse to squash it.
What DO boards and shareholders want? They want RESULTS. What’s the problem with innovation and results? Innovation isn’t just a thing, it’s driven by people with specific neurobiology. The often problem with that as the article explains; is that they often gravitate towards people with what the system, Predictive Index which is backed by 60 years of science refers to as the same or similar quadrant profile as pictured below.
For people in the top right quadrant, if they gravitate towards and stay with people in that corner; all they can do is ideas. In this scenario, they often cannot build the teams and systems around them to truly deliver results for the business. This appears to me to also be the #1 reason why promising innovation programs including startups can fail to scale.
This comes to a head now as the overwhelming multidisciplinary risk based management requirements for both cybersecurity and AI become urgent. Who’s on the AI team?
- Board of Directors
- Executives
- Project/program managers
- Clinical and business strategists
- IT specialists
- Informatics
- Cybersecurity leadership
- Regulatory and privacy law
- Data scientists & data engineers
- Clinicians
Surprise! This is also who should be on the cybersecurity team. Configurations of these title types make up our book teams and all the skills and functions are well represented by who industry leaders recognize as the best people in the business.
Leaders with an innovation orientation can and must partner with and help lead finance and marketing colleagues. This is by bringing them along and working together to drive enterprise value.
As posted here, collecting superstars in their respective fields won’t help you; it might even push you backwards. Much of the workforce do not have the capabilities to lead and work in these dynamic teams. The solution in my view is to set up a SEAL team.
Skills and Competencies Required for This Work
Management & Leadership
Required SKILLS
Don’t call it innovation. Then also look for vendor “seal” teams, and get stuff done. Drive and deliver results for all stakeholders. A lot of people don’t want to admit or see that this level of complexity and orchestration is required. We’ve always seen this at Medigram which is why we go through the effort of building dozens of leaders who can design, stand up, and run these multi functional multi disciplinary teams through the operating platform of our Trustworthy Technology and Innovation in Healthcare book series. Collectively, the teams include representation of all the stakeholders listed above in various use case topic specific permutations. They are run as small operating groups “seal units.” Let us know if you are doing this now, running these multi functional, multidisciplinary teams. If you’ve had any real success, let’s share lessons learned.
It’s a new era, may the best multi functional, multi disciplinary teams win!
In summary it takes the same management, leadership, skills, and competencies to manage risk levels for AI as risk based cybersecurity in ways that align with all the imminent international regulations.
Gratitude to Karen Jaw-Madson, our coach on Talent, Culture, & Leadership.
By Sherri Douville, CEO at Medigram, the Mobile Medicine company. Recognized in 8 categories of top CEOs by Board Room Media (Across SMS, mHealth, iOS, IT, Database, Big Data, Android, Healthcare). Top ranked medical market executive worldwide and #1 ranked in mobile technology categories (mhealth, iOS, Android), #1–2 (on any given day) for the cybersecurity market in the U.S. on Crunchbase. Best selling editor/author, Mobile Medicine: Overcoming People, Culture, and Governance & Advanced Health Technology: Managing Risk While Tackling Barriers to Rapid Acceleration, Taylor & Francis; Series Editor for Trustworthy Technology & Innovation + Trustworthy Technology & Innovation in Healthcare. (contracted to advise top academic and professional education publisher Routledge, Taylor & Francis).
Sherri is the co-chair of the IEEE/UL JV for the technical trust standard SG project for Clinical IoT in medicine, P2933. She is passionate about redefining technology, software and data for medicine and advanced health technologies in a way that’s worth the trust of clinicians, our family, and friends. Ms. Douville leverages her books to inform her work on the CHIME CDH security specialization certification board. She also advises and co-founded the Cybersecurity curriculum for the Black Corporate Board Readiness and Women’s Corporate Board Readiness programs at Santa Clara University.
