Innovation Unleashed Podcast

Although a “Big Event” disruption like the pandemic has presented brings extraordinary challenges, it also offer unique opportunity. As some of our former guests have discussed, times like these force leaders to take daring steps to ensure near-term survival and long-term sustainability and growth. According to the recent study, “Building Resilience & Maintaining Innovation in a Hybrid World,” productivity has remained stable or even increased for many companies that shifted to remote work in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

However, innovation has taken a hit as both leaders and team members feel more distant from each other.

Video meetings, instant messaging and texting can’t wholeheartedly duplicate the subtleties of being together in the same meeting room  - - - brainstorming, discussing strategies and building off of the energy and enthusiasm of one another.

Big event disruptions demand that leaders find a new way to liberate and tap into the innovation potential that exists inside their own organizations.

In the new book “Eat, Sleep, Innovate”, innovation expert Scott Anthony and his coauthors use groundbreaking research in behavioral science to provide a first-of-its-kind playbook for empowering individuals and teams to be their most curious and creative innovative thinking—every single day.  Scott is a Senior Partner at Innosight and former Managing Partner of the firm. Based in the firm’s Singapore offices since 2010, he has led Innosight’s expansion into the Asia-Pacific region as well as its venture capital activities (Innosight Ventures).

In his more than a decade with Innosight, Scott has advised senior leaders in companies such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Singtel, Kraft, General Electric, LG, the Ayala Group, and Cisco Systems on topics of growth and innovation. He has extensive experience in emerging markets, particularly in India, China, and the Philippines. In 2019, Scott was recognized as the #9 most influential management thinker by Thinkers50, a biannual ranking of global business thinkers. In 2017, he was awarded the Thinkers50 Innovation Award, which recognizes the world’s leading thinker on innovation.

More than 10 years after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented, healthcare reform still remains a top concern for the United States. For all of these past ten years, and even before, we have discussed and tried to fix the US health system to drive better access, increase affordability, and ensure equity. Yet:

• The number of uninsured Americans is rising. After reaching rock bottom of 28.7 million (8.9 percent of the population) in 2016, the number of uninsured people is expected to rise to 37.2 million (10.6 percent of the population) by 2028. This comes at a time when a growing body of research links insurance coverage to improvements in financial security, health, and longevity.
• Affordability—at both the health system and individual levels—is continuing to erode. Healthcare spending growth initially slowed after implementation of the ACA, but it has accelerated once again. The consequences of this acceleration are well established and include a growing national debt; strained federal, state, and local budgets; stagnant wages; and increased financial insecurity for Americans. Even for those with insurance coverage, health care is increasingly unaffordable: Roughly half of US adults have delayed or avoided care because of cost.
• And the numerous ways implicit bias, racism and prejudice drive objectionable inequalities in health and wellness are increasingly obvious. There remain unacceptable inequities in health care access and outcomes by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other dimensions. This has been made painfully obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken an unacceptably high and disparate toll on underserved communities and people of color.

The COVID 19 pandemic has only made things worse and more evident. Achieving any meaningful change now, in the middle of this global healthcare crisis, seems unlikely.  Conversations about changes like expanded insurance coverage, accelerating a US transition to value-based care, advancing home-based care, improving the affordability of drugs and other therapeutics…….leave us all confused and overwhelmed.

The guest on this episode, Jessica Brooks, can help us better understand what change is possible. She is an expert on these topics and the discussion around healthcare value, access and quality on behalf of employer-sponsored health insurance. Employer-sponsored health insurance affects about 156,199,800 Americans, or around 49% of the country's total population get their health insurance from their employer. Jessica is the President & Chief Executive Officer of the Pittsburgh Business Group on Health (PBGH). Under her leadership, PBGH has delivered more than $25 million in annual savings to employers, as well as intervention programs, which have saved employees more than six million dollars in copays and out of pocket expenses since its launch. Ms. Brooks leads the deployment of a comprehensive data strategy, which enables employers to better leverage healthcare and benefits information with health plans, providers and other partners. In many ways this data strategy informed the development of a roadmap as Covid-19 unfolded, allowing for insights on mental health, chronic condition management, COVID-19 cases and utilization insights that drove strategic engagement prioritization for employers.

She also created a transformative health equity tool, Health Desk, a platform of technology and human compassion – developed to bring patients, employers, hospitals, human resources, and patient advocates together to address bias and its impact on the patient experience.

 Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, telehealth was a small but growing healthcare market. It was limitedly used for urgent care type doctor visits. As the COVID-19 pandemic changed life for all of us in 2020, numerous hospitals and doctor’s offices pivoted hurriedly to virtual, telehealth appointments because patients were afraid to head to healthcare locations and the government created flexibility for telehealth to be covered by medical benefits. Within the first several months of the pandemic, 30% of Americans had used telehealth solutions with doctor’s usage rocketing as over 60% of healthcare providers started offering telehealth visits.

The use of telehealth is likely going to continue, especially in this first half of 2021 as COVID-19 continues to threaten the world. A recent report from Deloitte predicts the percentage of virtual video visits with doctors “will rise to 5% globally in 2021, up from an estimated 1% in 2019.” The Deloitte report added that people have become more comfortable using virtual visits and has grasped a better understanding of video-calling apps, especially older patients.

Telehealth will continue to enable access to necessary care in specialties with shortages, such as behavioral health, improve the patient experience, and ultimately improve health outcomes for patients. Essentially, the combination of fully virtual and near-virtual health solutions brings care closer to and directly into the home, increasing the ability for patients to access care when they need it increasing the likelihood that they will take the right steps to better manage their own health.

We are fortunate to have a leading telehealth expert with us on this episode. Julian Flannery is the founder and CEO of Summus Global. Summus Global is a virtual specialist platform that empowers families by providing people access to a network of 4,000+ top specialists across 48 leading hospitals -- within days, from anywhere in the world. The Summus model sets a new standard for speed of virtual access to high-quality medical expertise.

ONE YEAR LATER: REVISTING A GREAT CONVERSATION THAT TOOK PLACE PRE-COVID RESTRICTIONS

Driven by her visionary passion and ceaseless curiosity, Mary Ann Liebert identifies and nurtures critical topics and cutting-edge fields by creating first-to-market, specialized publications that play a vital role in advancing research and facilitating collaboration in academia, industry, and government.

Mary Ann became interested in medical publishing when she was searching literature to try to find an effective treatment for her father’s Parkinson’s disease. In the late 1960s, it was a very unusual illness. Although she was not able to find a new drug or therapy to help her father, this research ignited her interest in medical publishing. Founded by Mary Ann Liebert in 1980, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. is a leading independent publisher of scientific, technical, and medical content, known worldwide for its prescience and establishment of authoritative peer-reviewed journals, books, and trade publications in cutting-edge fields such as biotechnology, biomedical research, medicine and surgery, public health research and policy, technology and engineering, law, environmental research and policy, and other specialized disciplines. The company publishes over 90 peer-reviewed journals, leading trade magazines, and specialized newsletters, in addition to society membership management and conferences.

Mary Ann is deeply involved in the development and content of her more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific journals. Because of this she has extensive insight and interesting perspectives about many topics regarding medical innovation and practice. She has received numerous awards and accolades for her personal contributions in the fields of biotechnology and life sciences.

In this episode, we talk with Mary Ann about her career, her passions and the interesting medical topics covered by her 80 journals.

Any of us with young people in our lives likely have heard the stories of  Virtual reality (VR) games immersing  players in a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world. Virtual reality (VR) is the use of video and audio to immerse a user in the experience of an artificial environment, often in 3D and often with 360 degrees of vision. VR creates a fully rendered digital environment that replaces the user’s real-world environment. Galactic battles, time travel, underwater exploration, building civilizations………..the gaming possibilities are limitless.

The same VR that began for gaming and entertainment is also being leveraged as immersive learning to revolutionize how we train for high-risk jobs in fields such as military, safety and healthcare  - -  and how we most effectively prepare doctors, nurses and first responders with the critical skills necessary for complicated and dangerous procedures in a more immersive, hands-on and realistic training environment before they actually engage with real patients in need of medical care.

According to research from Goldman Sachs, by 2025 the market size for VR and augmented reality software alone may reach $35 billion, including more than $5 billion devoted just to health care. In the life sciences and health care fields, the market for virtual patient simulations is expected to grow almost 20 percent a year to become a billion-and-a-half-dollar industry by 2025.

The guest in this episode, Dr Brennan Spiegel, MD, is a world renowned expert in how using digital technologies such as VR can transform healthcare. He is the director of Cedars-Sinai Health Services Research. He directs the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CS-CORE), a multidisciplinary team that investigates how digital health technologies — including wearable biosensors, smartphone applications, virtual reality and social media — can strengthen the patient-doctor bond, improve outcomes and save money. CS-CORE unites clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, statisticians and health services researchers to invent, test and implement digital innovations, always focusing on the value of technology to patients and their providers. Spiegel has published numerous best-selling medical textbooks, editorials and more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is listed in the Onalytica "Top 100 Influencer" lists for digital health (No. 13) and virtual reality (No. 14). His digital health research has been featured by major media outlets, including NBC News, PBS, Forbes, Bloomberg, NPR and Reuters. Beyond his focus on digital health innovations, Spiegel conducts psychometric, health-economic, epidemiologic and qualitative research across a wide range of healthcare topics. As a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Field Advisory Committee, Spiegel also develops endpoints for clinical trials. His research team receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Hearst Foundation, Veterans Administration and industry sources. Spiegel is editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology, the leading clinical gastroenterology journal in North America. He continues to practice clinical medicine and maintains a busy academic teaching practice at Cedars-Sinai. A prolific speaker, Spiegel is frequently invited to present on his areas of expertise at national and international events.

Dr. Spiegel has spent years studying the medical power of the mind, and in his new book, VRx: How Virtual Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine, he reveals how simple virtual reality headsets can offer us a new way to heal by tricking the body into thinking it’s somewhere that it isn’t, or can do something that it can’t usually do.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a massive shock to consumer loyalty. McKinsey’s latest research on customer attitudes and habits has revealed that 35 percent of United States consumers have tried a new brand since the crisis began while 77 percent have also tried new shopping behaviors, including new channels, stores, and brands. That same rate generally holds true for consumers surveyed all around the world during these trying times. A key driver in these shopping behaviors is personalization. A recent report by Deloitte reported that 1 in 5 consumers are willing to pay 20% more for a personalized or exclusive product and 46% of consumers say they are happy to wait longer to get their customized product or service.

Personalization in online shopping is nothing new, but real-time personalized offers based on artificial intelligence in a two-sided marketplace is the new wave of the future.

According to futurist and Forbes contributor Blake Morgan, consumers have come to expect an equal amount and effort toward personalization from companies of all sizes that they interact with. Consumer personalization efforts to build relationships and create better experiences can pay off with serious rewards for businesses and companies that don’t prioritize creating a tailored experience run the risk of getting left behind. According to a Survey conducted by Salesforce:

• 70% of consumers say that a company understanding how they use products and services is very important to winning their business.
• Consumers are 2.1x more likely to view personalized offers as important versus unimportant.
• 59% of consumers say personalized engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their repeat business.
• 70% of consumers say a company’s understanding of their personal needs influences their loyalty.

Right now especially with job uncertainty and financial strain on families, consumers, along with personalization need more purchasing power when they are choosing how to spend their money on things like food, gas and groceries. They are making buying decisions based on affordability and choosing to interact with businesses that are showing them that they understand their personal needs and are willing to reward their loyalty.  The reality is that both customers AND brick-and-mortar businesses are weathering these very difficult times and both need to benefit from what is essentially a two-sided business relationship. People need more value for their dollar on everyday purchases and businesses need to generate profits to stay open.

On this episode, our guest Wayne Lin has been working for years to help consumers have personalized buying opportunities and get the most incentive possible from their decisions while helping businesses connect to valuable customers and profits. As Co-founder and COO of the company GetUpside, he has worked to help people get more value for their dollar on everyday purchases and to help businesses consolidate demand for their products and services by digitally personalizing brick-and-mortar business and connecting customers with local businesses that offer the best value on the things that they need. And he is doing something very right.

Just on the GetUpside platform alone, customer transactions have grown 1,700% in the last year. More than 26 million customer users with access to offers have earned tens of millions of dollars in cash back loyalty rewards from more than 20,000 merchants nation-wide, with over $1B in business running through the platform.

There is no shortage of predictions about how advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics will possibly see humans replaced in all kinds of jobs. Technological advances in artificial intelligence have certainly made it possible to use robotics and automate many jobs that previously could only be done by a human. Despite fears or questions about robots taking over, human brainpower will still be necessary. Realistically, instead of destroying entire jobs and creating completely new robot-led occupations AI and automation will most likely more change what activities people focus on in their work and perhaps share with AI-driven robots.

According to McKinsey, given currently demonstrated technologies, very few occupations—less than 5 percent—are candidates for full automation. However, almost every occupation has partial automation potential, and a proportion of its activities could be automated. McKinsey estimates that about half of all the activities people are paid to do in the world’s workforce could potentially be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. That amounts to almost $15 trillion in wages.

Depending on the job and the area of application, humans and robots can work together with varying degrees of collaboration. Industry calls this “human-robot collaboration.” This collaboration is defined as:

Coexistence: Humans and robots work in adjacent workspaces without safety fencing. They do not, however, share a common workspace and work independently of one another on different tasks.

Cooperation: In human-robot cooperation, humans and robots work in the same workspace. They work alternately on different tasks within a process. There is no direct interaction.

Collaboration: Humans and robots interact in a shared workspace. For example, the robot passes something to the human operator, or they simultaneously perform different tasks on the same work.

Today’s guests Laura Major and Julie Shah have dedicated their careers to this idea of advanced human-robot interaction.

Laura Major is CTO of Motional (previously Hyundai-Aptiv Autonomous Driving Joint Venture), where she leads the development of autonomous vehicles. Previously, she led the development of autonomous aerial vehicles at CyPhy Works and a division at Draper Laboratory. Major has been recognized as a national Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leader. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Julie Shah is a roboticist at MIT and an associate dean of social and ethical responsibilities of computing. She directs the Interactive Robotics Group in the Schwarzman College of Computing at MIT. She was a Radcliffe fellow, has received an National Science Foundation Career Award, and has been named one of MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35." She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They have co-authored the book WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING ROBOTS, introducing us to the revolutionary idea of human-robot collaboration. They believe that next generation of robots won’t be limited to specific tasks like your Roomba and Alexa are right now. They will be able to drive on roads, deliver goods, stock shelves, and coordinate teams of nurses and doctors. These advanced machines will work with us, not just for us.

At a moment in time when we, as Americans, are depending heavily on the media for information about the US election, the coronavirus pandemic and other national and global developments, the public remains fundamentally untrusting of the media. According to Gallup, four in 10 U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" (9%) or "a fair amount" (31%) of trust and confidence in the media to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly," while six in 10 have "not very much" trust (27%) or "none at all" (33%).

Gallup began asking about trust in the media in 1972 and has continued to do so nearly every year since 1997. Trust ranged between 68% and 72% in the 1970s, and though it had declined by the late 1990s, it remained at the majority level until 2004, when it dipped to 44%. After hitting 50% in 2005, it has not risen above 47%.

The latest findings, from Gallup's annual Governance poll conducted (Aug. 31-Sept. 13,) are consistent with all but one recent trust rating -- in 2016, a steep decline in Republicans' trust in the media led to the lowest reading on record (32%).

Republicans' trust has not improved since then, while Democrats' has risen sharply. In fact, Democrats' trust over the past four years has been among the highest Gallup has measured for any party in the past two decades. This year, the result is a record 63-percentage-point gap in trust among the political party groups.

And yet with all of this mistrust and political polarization and pessimism about the news media in the U.S., the majority of Americans still believe strongly that an independent media is absolutely crucial to a functioning democracy.  (Gallup and the Knight Foundation's Trust, Media and Democracy.)

• 81% of surveyed say news media is "critical" or "very important" to democracy
• 83% think there is at least a fair amount of political bias in news coverage
• Republicans most likely to perceive political bias in news media

So with all of this distrust, how can we know we are getting the truth from news sources?

The guest on this episode, Arjun Moorthy is here to help. Arjun has always loved the news -- - ever since he was a paper boy in middle school and through becoming editor in chief of the Stanford reporter. He believes that best news enlightens us, brings us together, and improves our communities. Arjun is currently CEO and Co-Founder of The Factual -   a news-related aggregation and ranking website based in San Mateo, California. The website aims to address the increasing polarization of society, driven by social media, by surfacing the most credible stories across the political spectrum. The Factual delivers news mainly via a daily email-based newsletter but you can also access this on-demand on their website.

The Factual analyzes the credibility of over 20,000 stories every single day.

The word innovation is a much used banner of business leaders, academics and entrepreneurs. People like me and Lynn who work to leverage technology to solve big problems, and hopefully change the world for the better, pride ourselves on being called innovators. Even this podcast is guilty of using the word innovation as our title and brand. The irony behind his proudly used king of buzzwords is that, originally, "innovation," which is derived from the Latin word innovationem, wasn't a compliment. It was an accusation. It wasn’t first used as a noun of action – “a new idea, device, or method” – until the 16th century. Until then, “novators” were treated with suspicion. A novator was someone with deviant political or religious beliefs undermining the traditional power structure.

As we use the term today, innovation refers to the process of executing ideas which result in the creation of value for an organization and its customers. An innovative idea should be able to address a targeted need, issue, goal or objective that an organization or group has outlined.  The innovative idea should use new methods, original thoughts and creative thinking.  It must ultimately result in an advancement to a product, process or service.

I think though, that in order to get out of the “buzzword” way of thinking, the focus should shift away from the term itself to the development of skills and behaviors that are necessary to actually implement ideas.

61% of respondents participating in PwC’s Innovation Benchmark report say embracing an open innovation approach to generate new ideas is definitely something that is recognized as beneficial to any organization.  Yet, nearly three out of four global executives believe a lack of skills is an issue facing their industry. And 64 percent say this problem is restricting their ability to innovate. (GE Global Innovation Barometer)

The guest on this episode, Brant Cooper, understands that business and personal success is about building innovative skills and behaviors. He is an expert at teaching leaders how to find personal and economic growth through creating new value for fellow humans. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of Moves the Needle. With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends agile, design thinking, and lean methodologies to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations. Brant leads a team of 4 to produce a $2M annual run rate. He has helped more than 60 enterprise clients build an “entrepreneurial spirit” in their organizations.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Traumatic brain injury (or TBI as you have heard of it) is a major cause of death and disability in the United States. TBIs contribute to about 30% of all injury deaths. Every day, more than 150 people in the United States die from injuries that include TBI.  Fifty people will have died from a TBI while you listen to this podcast. 

Those who survive a TBI can face effects that last a few days, or for the rest of their lives. Effects of TBI can include impaired thinking or memory, movement, sensation (e.g., vision or hearing), or emotional functioning (e.g., personality changes, depression). A TBI is caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head that disrupts the normal function of the brain. Not all blows or jolts to the head result in a TBI and figuring out when a blow has caused impairment, a step on the way to impairment or no effect has vexed scientists and engineers for decades.

Most TBIs are basically concussions…but the statistics are scary…3 million TBI-related emergency department (ED) visits, hospitalizations, and deaths occurred in the United States.

Because no two people are exactly alike, no two brain injuries are exactly alike. So how can we create accurate and predictive diagnostic devices that inform us about not just what immediate damage was caused, but what may happen and how to measure whether we are fixing it?

A Pittsburgh-based company is using its 30 plus years of experience in eye tracking technology to help with the diagnosis of TBI. NeuroKinetics is a world leader in eye tracking technology and non-invasive neuro-otologic diagnostic testing. Central to their I-Portal® product mix and advances in clinical eye tracking is the premise that the eye is the window to the brain.

The guest on this episode, Neuro Kinetics CEO, Howison Schroeder, has been building a successful company that is based on technology that precisely tracks the reflexive responses of the eye in response to a battery of stimuli. Their research has shown that the detection of abnormal eye movements can indicate the presence of over 200 diseases and medical conditions. The technology is non-invasive and could become a powerful indicator of disease and prognosis. Concussions are not just clinically important, the estimated commercial market for an effective concussion diagnostic exceeds $1.5 billion.