Healthcare Innovation News: Building a Culture of Innovation
Nack Bay Senior Vice President, Strategy Consulting, Michelle Hoffman provided insight in the April issue of Healthcare Innovation News, “How Do You Build a Culture of Innovation Within Your Organization?”
In the current lexicon of “disruption,” “pivots” and “paradigm shifts,” the term “innovation” sometimes connotes a powerful, dynamic, cataclysmic ushering in of the new and a rendering of everything that came before as obsolete. In this context, “innovation” is lightening flashing, a force of nature that strikes randomly but with great impact. At Back Bay Life Science Advisors (BBLSA), innovation is better illustrated by wind, constantly blowing in fits and starts, gradually etching away stone to slowly reveal new topology. It is the art of reiteration, the production of permutation, the discarding of the below par and the selection of small, incremental improvements. Based on this principle of steady gradualism, we have built a culture of innovation that rests on three key team characteristics: • Commitment to bespoke work. Our analyses are tailored to each company’s problem even if we have worked previously in the same general space. As a result, we perform multiple analyses on slight variations on the same problem. • Obsessive skepticism. When it comes to initial facts and conventional wisdom, we are not trustful and we verify everything—even if it is a prior analysis. Because of this characteristic, we look at a single problem from all different angles, trying to find the perspectives that are false and winnowing to the right final view. • Our culture of apprenticeship. Our boutique size allows recent college grads to work side by side with veterans in senior management. This ensures knowledge transfer from senior people to junior people, and it also ensures that our senior people are constantly being questioned and challenged by a neophyte who is, as the second characteristic dictates, relentlessly curious.
Subscribers to Healthcare Innovation News will find Dr. Hoffman’s insight by following this link.