Does Your Hospital Have An Innovation Management System?

We will need to innovate our way out of this recession. Doctors need a system to help them.

Hospitals have all kinds of systems to manage people, cliinical and administrative processes, assets and money. Very few have an Innovation Management Systems to identify, capture, develop, vet and launch innovation.

At www.venturequestltd.com , we work with healthcare clients to create the structure and processes necessary to insitutionalize creativity and innovation in healthcare. Among the many reasons for building such a system are it creates a competitive advantage, it  creates non-clinical revenue, and it attracts talented staff. There are three basic steps involved.

The first is an internal process of making faculty and staff aware of the process, soliciting invention disclosures, cataloging them, and detemining which are a strategic fit and worthy of further development.

The second step involves using tools and assessment techniques to determine whether the idea has market potential, is legally structured properly, has intellectual property protection and freedom to operate, and is technically feasible with time and budgetary guidelines. The essential part of this exercise is to get inventor input and well as critique and analysis from multiple innovation stakeholders of the feasibillity plan,  like content experts, advisors and executive leadership.

The third and final phase deals with further developing ideas that have passed the previous stage gates and given a go decision. The charge now is to write a commericalization or business plan , follow a spinout , licensing or other strategy, and secure the resources and talent to move the ideas foward to market.

We all have process, product and service ideas to thow into the top of the innovation funnel. The challenge is to stratify the ideas and pick an innovation portfolio that can be managed.

The beauty of the system is that innovators use simple, structured, valid tools to do a self-assessment of their ideas. The result is that bad ideas are killed early, marginal ideas are returned for further development, and good ideas are put to the head of the line. No one like to have their baby called ugly. Innovation Management Systems provide an objective, structured pathway using valid selection criteria to screen and stratify ideas. That way, you get to call your own baby ugly with no hard feelings.