Innovation

The Entrepreneur, the Expert and the NDA

I recently went through a very tricky challenge whilst mentoring early stage founders. A #NDA, inappropriately written and sent in the wrong circumstances, triggered a surprisingly negative email response from an expert I knew as courteous and generous with their time and expertise.

Thankfully, we were able to solve this situation and we had a very productive discussion, far beyond my most optimistic expectations.

We also all learned from this painful mistake. We learned of the hidden costs of NDAs, and of their complete uselessness most of the time. We all agreed that their defacto use a prerequisite for any discussion in entrepreneurship has more to do with cargo-culting and fake expertise (reminded me of the mention on Linkedin of “advisors” in Sydney getting 20% of equity from founders) than with any “Innovation and IP Strategy”.

Continue reading

Ethic Questions

Linkedin, Digital Health and Ethics

The development of self driving cars has shine a bright light on the tramway challenge, which has reached meme status.

The digital health revolution is no different and has created gazillions of ethical challenges. You can call that a goldmine of ethic questions, if you like your glass half-full or are a professional ethicist. Or you can call it a minefield, if you are an entrepreneur in health tech, or an investor backing such a venture. Ethics-wise, healthtech does not play in the same league as another regulated industry, miltech. The concepts of risk and benefits are used in both leagues, but with meanings that are not compatible. Health tech does not play either in the same league as “plain” tech (aka YC). The concepts of risk and benefits most of the time share now compatible definitions, i.e. use roughly the same axes to describe their space of operations. But still, the benchmarks and values measured alongside these axes differ widely.

Continue reading

Pebble

Great article by Eric Migicovsky, founder of pebble.

Continue reading

TRIZ

Brilliant example of Innovation. Moving our energy grids away from fossil fuel comes with many challenges, among them the storage of energy at the yearly/seasonal scale. There are several existing solutions already developed, based on different principles. But pushing these solutions further is raising other, new challenges: using more rare materials creates further environmental damage and generate politico-economic incidents. Some tech may be dangerous at large scale, or too costly, or have a too large footprint.

Continue reading

2050 Crossroads

2050 Crossroads

A book by Hicham Naim

I believe anticipation is a fundamental part of innovation.

There are plenty of futurist magazine articles that promise us a life of luxury, comfort and performance thanks to all sorts of new technology developments based on bench prototypes and university lab press releases.

This is very common with generalist ’tech’ press, that will cover vehicles and transportation, space travel, housing, leisure etc. Healthtech and medtech are no stranger to this trend (I plead guilty. My linkedin feed is full of neurotech news). And that’s justifiable. It’s not possible not to feel emotional when seeing videos of deaf patients hearing for the first time their love ones (thx cochlear implants), or accident victims with a severed spinal cord who can feel/move their lower limbs. The list goes on, and this can only trigger a biased-but-understandable techno-optimism. Techno-optimism is not bad per se. It is on the opposite a necessary quality for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs cannot pull through the amount of work, research, pivots and trials it takes to put an innovation on the market without a deep belief in their technology.

Continue reading