Pecha Kucha Presentations

Going through the Pecha Kucha presentations of the class were very interesting.  As I was going through the presentations I noticed a couple of things rang out for me.

1) The styles of the presentations:  Even though we were all given the same link for the description of a Pecha Kucha presentation there was still a lot of different interpretations of what this meant.  Most specifically, some people struggled with getting away from text on their slides.
2) Although their inventions or impact to their fields were very different there was a common these among the different innovators. Perseverance.  All of these inventors had perseverance, almost to the point of obsession that drove them to achieve their dreams.
3) Belief in human potential.  Several of the inventor presentations I watched all of the inventors focused on how their work could positively impact the lives of other people,  examples include Salk, Nobel, and Sikorsky.

One Goal Console - Benefits in a Life Example

This is the story of a daughter that needs to put her father in hospice.

The daughter is distraught over putting her father into a hospice and is terrified that her father will have to take his last breath alone.  Before making her final decision she is touring different facilities to meet with the staff and get an understanding of how they run their sites.  She was very frustrated over her visits because of their high staff to patient ratio and did not feel comfortable that when he needed them they would know in a reasonable amount of time.  Her visit to the last facility in the area lifted her spirits.  The staff manager introduced her to a new technology called the one goal console.  The console allowed the staff to see exactly what is going on with the patient at all times.  It allows them to monitor all vitals, medications, feeding pumps, and respirators at the same time on the same screen so they can quickly identify status changes on any of their patients.  This made her feel much better that her father’s needs would be attended to – but she had one main question.  She asked the staff manager if that meant that her father would get less personal attention, because at this stage in his life this was so important and because of work she would not be able to be there all the time.  The staff manager assured her that it meant her father would get more attention.  Because of the One Goal Console the staff would be able to spend time with the patients rather than running around checking all of the different devices.  The daughter felt very reassured and decided this was the perfect facility for her father and was able to worry significantly less knowing he was in good hands while she couldn’t be there.

Market Review - One Goal Console

As a part of this blog assignment we are asked to look at the One Goal Console market size using 4 different ways to estimate: (1) demand, (2) addressable market, (3) realistic opportunities vs competition, (4) targeted selection of "winnable" market opportunities.

The concept of the one goal console is to integrate all of the separate medical devices located in a patient’s room to wirelessly transmit their data into a database that can be accessed by hospital staff and automatically recorded into the patient’s medical records.

1)       Demand: 

There is nothing on the market today does exactly what the One Goal Console is intended to do but there are many indications from new products that are being released, technology improvement outside the medical arena, and the improvements being made in electronic medical records that this is a next logical step for the patient care environment.  Based on the benefits of improved visibility and response time it will ultimately lead to improved patient care.  With this key benefit the team believes this will drive the demand to patient care settings with its biggest benefit being within the acute care hospital environment first, then other areas of the hospital, and moving onto alternate site setting such as long term care facilities and hospices.  Though this would also be a help for day centers or doctor’s offices the demand will be lower in these areas because the benefits of a device like this are significantly lower than for a hospital setting.

2)       Addressable Market: 

The addressable market would be considered similar to the sites discussed in section 1 above.  Because there are different markets within the patient care sector it will give the One Goal Console R&D team the opportunity to scale their design to offer different levels of the same product to keep the entire sector in the addressable market size.  The only area that they team has discussed as potentially unaddressable is areas in California were Kaiser Permanente has a strong hold in the technology that is utilized in their facilities and often creates their own personalized solutions.  At this point we still consider this area addressable because it is not clear what their system is currently using and whether or not Kaiser is moving in that direction.

3)        Realistic Opportunities vs. Competition:  

As mentioned above we do see Kaiser Permanente as a risk that could limit our opportunities but would want to explore what they are currently and whether or not there are still opportunities in those areas that are non-Kaiser systems.   Though Kaiser does create a lot of their own technology solutions if they do not already have something in the works we may want to work with them to license our software option to them.

Another group to consider is wireless technology solutions.  This group would not be considered competition but it is important that the One Goal Console stay up to speed on what the most current and most common options are so we ensure that our product will work seamlessly with their configurations.

And last but not least an important group to consider is the medical device manufacturers.  Though moving into this space may have a different focus than what they do today it is not completely out of scope for them.  The devices they current produce are often strongly software focused, many are already integrating wireless options and (especially the large medical device manufacturers) already have a strong presence in hospitals.  Our opportunity here is to work with them to incentivize them to include the capability to connect to One Goal Console for future generations or to ultimately consider selling the company down the road once the market has been proven.

4)       Targeted selection of "winnable" market opportunities:  The team has decided to target in stages:

To prove the concept before approaching Marquis Accounts the product will be developed and target different customer segments in stages.

Stage 1 – Proof of Concepts:  Day surgery centers:  These types of facilities would be simpler to integrate because:

·         The number of devices would be minimal: the standard parameters to consider would be blood pressure, oxygen, and heart rate and potentially medication pumps.

·         Smaller number of beds affected.

·         The amount of time per patient is less

·         The amount of data to be transferred to their file would also be minimized. 

Stage 2 – Proof of Scale Up: Private Hospice or certain units of a Long-Term Care Facilities:  This would increase the complexity of the technology without getting into the full scale challenges introduced when going to hospitals. 

·         It would require an increased number of devices that are used to monitor patients such as respirators and enteral feeding pumps.

·         The amount of time the patient will be monitored is increased.

·         The number of beds remains small.

Stage 3 – Hospital Beta Trail:  Using the data collected from Stages 1 and 2 it will help to persuade a hospital board to trial the system, with the expectation that ultimately the trial would convert to an account.

Stage 4 - Marquis Hospital Account - Stage 3 would allow the focus to shift to a full scale launch.  Obtaining a marquis account would allow us to go for either a buy out from a large medical device company or get revenue or additional funding to allow for incremental improvements and development of the next generation version.

Innovation in Big Companies - Roadblocks

Working for a big company I have had exposure to some of the roadblocks to innovation, from my experience I have seen groups struggle with the following.  

1)      Daily workload.   The company can set up all the initiatives they want if employees aren’t given the time and/or resources to do their brainstorming and initial development work it will be not be successful.

2)      Appetite for Risk.  It can often come down to the management team or even individual managers, if they are not willing to take risks on new idea and have historically not given them the attention they need to move forward,  then employees may not feel empowered to work and present these ideas to the business team.

3)      Culture and Attitude.  This is very important and some aspects of it ties to #s 1 and 2.  But to add another dimension to it, this can be driven by the team members themselves.  If you have ever known a true inventor you will know how critical the attitude of the individual is – they must be creative, driven, and willing to fail before they can succeed.  Having members of your group that have this kind of attitude can inspire others to think outside the box.  Where if the group is burdened with the opposite - check the box, do my work and go home type, especially when those individuals are senior members it can stifle the creativity level of the group.

Inbound Marketing Only?

First I think it’s important to clarify the difference between inbound and outbound marketing.  I think of outbound marketing as traditional marketing, it includes advertisements, conferences, cold calls, etc.  Basically it is when the company is reaching out to the potential customer base to spread the word about the product or brand.   Inbound marketing is different in such that the customer is the one searching for you, for example a customer goes online performs a search that leads them to your website. Both types of marketing are very important but the relative importance of each will be driven by the type of product. 

In terms of inbound marketing it is feasible to have inbound marketing only if the product or service is only sold online.  This is emphasized for the product or service if it could be considered a commodity.  The first thing that came to mind for me was invitations.  Say you are planning a baby or wedding shower and you go online and do a search for invitations there are several websites that will come up.  Your first impression on the way that these websites look and the ease of use when trying to navigate will influence whether or not you will use the site, often even if the prices are lower.

Outbound marketing is more important if:

1)      Trying to promote the brand

2)      Convert customers from a competitor

3)      The product is unavailable online

4)      The consumer base in unlikely to do an Internet search for the product

An example of this would be in new technology development.  If the consumer doesn’t know to search for it then the inbound marketing would be useless.  An example of this is online insurance.  When this industry was new it was extremely important to have a combination of outbound marketing for brand promotion to get the word out and inbound marketing so once they have gotten to the site it is visually attractive, easy to use, and providing a service of value.