Notes

Reflection 3:

Over the course of designing a product for the recent presentation, I learned some interesting things that I would like to apply to future HTE projects. The insights described below are as follows Needs Filtering, Personal Motivation, Teamwork, Business Plan, Presentation, and Future Considerations.

1. Needs Filtering: Think More
Our group had some amazing ideas. Some of the runners up included: a "smart-toothbrush" that monitors oral health, a patient-based EMR system, and the health-monitor idea (see email thread w/Dr. Agus). Ultimately several teammembers compromized to decide on Guardian Gear (the hip-protector) because of feasibility and the obvious market. Many of our other ideas could probabaly have been simplified or adapted to suit our skills/requirments and interests if we had taken more time to analyze our needs. I've heard from several people now that coming up with the right need to work on is the most important part of the innovation process.

2. Motivation
Over the process of brainstorming, I've realized that the projects that really drive me are all directly related to things that affect very close friends or family. While several of the ideas we brainstormed were highly significant in a statistical sense, many were insignificant to me personally, and I felt very low motivation to think about them.

3. Teamwork
I think we interacted well as a team. In particular, I really valued Kunling's contributions to our project. I've noticed he tends to a bit quiet in group settings, so I made a particular effort to get his opinion throughout the discussion. Several times, the three of us would quickly get stuck in some discussion without even noticing it, then I'd ask Kunling what he thought, and he'd have the solution. His insights were great. One of my biggest personal learning experiences this semester (from HTE and from Keck) is that loud/outgoing people don't necessarily have the best ideas and that making the effort to get the quieter people invovled can really improve the discussion.

3. Business Plan
Over the last 2-3 years, lots of people have been talked to me about the importance of IP, IP, IP... however, over this semester it has become really clear to me that somebody's success is not going to founded purely on IP, but on a combo on IP and a solid business/marketing strategy. This became crystal clear during the competitor-research section of our project. So many people have built airbag-belts/bacpacks for seniors that have failed because they had a bad marketing strategy (sold to the wrong audience or terrible branding).

It was as if the companies were founded and run by scientists/engineers who built solid technologies but didn't recognizing the value of good business planning. Application to HTE: 1st build a solid device. Then, spend a lot of time working on a business plan, do lots of initial testing on a specific sub-section of the market, spend a lot of time on Design. Steve Montgomery from Cepheid comes to mind. His entire job (or at least a major portion of it) was to shape the perception of the Cepheid machines. I think that is an incredibly important aspect of launching a product or pitching it to investors.

4. Importance of a Well Designed Presentation
My goal for the presentation was to apply design princples to create an engaging, motivating talk. I wanted to incorporate elements from some great pitches/TED talks/Dr. Agus's talk into our pitch, mainly: story, simplicity, clarity, and flow.

Overall, I'm pleased how it went for a first run, but it could've been much better if I had gotten feedback/iterated... I think the simplicity of the slides and high images:text ratio were good. Also, I think my energy level was good. However, my volume/pitch was not relaxed/conversational enough. I'm remembering how naturally Agus shared his research with us. While he was energetic and covered a lot of material, at no point did I feel like he was "giving a speech." He sounded very conversational and that drew us into his story.

I also wonder how to get the rest of the team involved in the pitch. Someone initially suggested that having all 4 people take turns giving parts of the pitch would look awkward and that it would look better to have 1 person do the presentation (e.g. TED talks). Is this necessarily true? Have there been any good pitches delivered by a group of people?

5. Future Considerations
-Team motivation: It's very important for each person on the team to exactly what everyone else on the team is motivated by as well as the specific skills/constraints that each person will have over the next 4 years. These personal motivating factors should be used in addition to the other needs-filtering criteria to select a project. The HTE project is going to be what we make it. Unless it relates Directly to the engineers' primary projects, the HTE project will likely be a side project for them. They will feel little to no pressure from their research advisors to create an excellent result, and thus the success of the project will almost completely hinge on thier personal motivation. For the medical students, the project is slightly more important as it will be our primary research project; however, how far we take the project is also very variable. Whether we seek to simply complete the requirements of RSP or try to launch a sustainable company will also depend on our personal motivation.

Bottom line: We all need to be 100% behind our project to get the best result. I'm not sure how long it will take to find a project/need that does this, but I think its key. Otherwise, some of us will be super-motivated and others less-motivated, and that will create a unmotivating situation where a part of the team needs to compensate for the less interested team members.

Additionally, we have to set very specific expectations. Based on converstaions with a few engineers/med students, I've discovered that some of us are interested in pitching/launching products in 1-2 years, while others are more interested in doing research to refine concepts for product launches in 3-4+ years. Personally, I am very interested in using the HTE framework to work on an engaging, personally-important problem. I want to refine the technology with a lot of prototyping, quick low-cost testing, iteration, and market testing/initial validation. Launching the product before graduating is not my goal, however, I want to have a solid, working prototype by that point. One of my goals over break is to get a better idea of what the rest of medical school will require of me over the next 3.5 years to further refine this expectation.

I've heard from a few 3rd years that HTE should be easy projects that target incremental needs and don't require too much time. On face value, there are definatley many obvious reasons to build incremental solutions over blue-sky solutions. However, perhaps it's possible to address a serious, blue-sky type of problem within our constraints.

I wonder if we should spend some time thinking of ways to address a blue-sky problem by stratifying it and working on some aspect of it which is easier to tackle. That way our project can be specific and small enough to accomplish on our time-scale but have potential for futher growth and development (after HTE) into a larger, more comprehensive solution. For example, a blue-sky need could be for a way to detect of cancer before the mass is large enough to see on conventional scans. While this is clearly a huge need, too big for 1000s of researchers around the world and certainly for HTE, a smaller take on the problem, like the "health monitor" may eventually open avenues to target the big need. Right now, we're talking about validating the homeostasis monitor by detecting cold, fever...but eventually, as the sensors/algorithms improve, it has the potential to measure many more diseases, perhaps even do early cancer detection. Rather than thinking of how to choose a project that will fit within the scope of HTE, perhaps a better place to start is by first thinking of very interesting projects/needs (even those which cannot be done within the scope of HTE) and finding ways to break the big need down into something that is feasible, which could logically be expected to grow into a larger solution for the blue-sky problem.

As I write this,

How to invovle more people? (key, build a prototype, raise money, then find additional help, but who and how long?)