Hello !

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I started coaching in healthcare innovation 10 years ago. When I say "innovation," I do not mean only projects led by a professional innovation team but also, most importantly, by non-professional innovators. I am talking to leaders and teams in digital health, marketing, business excellence, medical, access, pricing, and innovation.

I see a pattern of frequent errors when corporate teams start a new "innovation" project. I will list the main mistakes and share my top five easy tips for preventing these risks so you can save time and money.

Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

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✨ Spark

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Here are projects I led recently where teams made the mistakes I will help you avoid:

• set up a new process for access and price to adapt to the new European Health Technology Assessment as of January 2025 (EU HTA)
• adapt to the local market a new digital health solution for physicians selected by the company's global organization
• starting a pilot with a startup to provide a solution for a hospital. This startup was met during a call for challenges or an open innovation program
• shifting from selling a product to a subscription model for private clinic lab instruments as a project follow-up of an internal Hackathon
• proposing new services to the hospital's pharmacy to ease the stock and preparation of Cell and Gene therapies.

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✏ Errors #1: Rules of the game are not understood: the 2 Worlds

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Any project you lead can be split into these two worlds: Exploit vs Explore.

Exploit world: exploit current assets (products and services) and optimize the current system. I like to represent like this:

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It is like an engineer or a scientist involved in setting up and optimizing oil wells: predictability, little uncertainty, and regularity. The goal is efficiency.

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Explore world: develop new products and services. Optimization is not the goal but discovery.

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In Explore, it is like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, ready to discover dangerous parts of the world and maybe find a treasure. Here, we live with high risk, uncertainty, and little predictability. And with the increased speed of technology (like artificial intelligence), more projects are being done in Explore World.

The skills and processes employees master to achieve success and recognition in the Exploit World, characterized by clear execution and minimal uncertainty, cause them to fail in Explore World.

So you need to clarify the world they operate within: What is the level of uncertainty and the level of best practices available? Is this project in Exploit or Explore World?

✏ Errors #2 : Too many cooks - Lack of accountability and roles

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Who is in charge? Is it a digital health, innovation, or marketing team? Because these Explore World projects are more complex, you must spend more time clarifying roles and accountability.

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You also need to consider additional roles like

• the voice of the customers and user interface roles to help the team focus even more on uncovering the needs they want to solve
• agile coach or scrum master to speed the discovery process. The Explore world is where agile brings more impact. (see below how)

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✏ Errors #3 : Lack of deadline and goals

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I often hear, " Our innovation projects are too complex, and we are uncertain about setting a deadline." But No deadline = No goals = No outcomes.

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✏ Errors #4: Lack of skills and mindset

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"We have always done it this way," and we have been successful so far (my face is like that when I hear that 😡)

How do you excel in discovery interviews, partnerships, and mastering fast prototyping, which differs significantly from the Exploit business skills?

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✏ Errors #5:Lack of process

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"We are decentralized and use fit-for-purpose methods". Or "we are too small to have a process."

A process or at least some mandatory checklist will ensure your team has the proper habits. I will show you below where to start.

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✨ Hack

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✏ Rules of the game Exploit and Explore: make it explicit

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Even if your team is not the innovation team, and even if you have the voice of a customer lead with you, your team needs to understand what is different from their daily work (exploit) vs explore world.

• Agile project management: a perfect place to train your team to use agile or scale its use.
• Mindset: Perfectionism is the enemy, speed of learning is the goal, and the goal is to find the right problem first.
• Decision making: based on data collected from the market: small dataset = small decision; big dataset = big decision.

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For example, before and after a Hackathon, ensure sessions on the process from idea to market and explain the steps participants must go through. This is also an excellent opportunity to confirm time allocation and commitment.

Another example is once you start engaging with a startup that could solve one of your customers' needs, explain the steps of this "pilot" phase to the marketing and medical teams and your customers.

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✏ Deadlines and goals: Break complexity with small project loops

You don't need an organizational framework like Agile, Scrum, or SAFE to set up your Explore projects in agile loop circles.

Here is what I mean:

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1- You know the direction of the vision - the goals on the right with the arrow.

2- The middle part in grey is unknown. We try to gorget this part - too stressful 😅

3- You reduce the uncertainty (all the grey parts) by clarifying the scope of the work to do within the next 4 to 12 weeks. In agile, we call it a sprint. And so there is no more excuse for not having measurable goals like a number of interviews run, a number of presentations of the solution to budget holders 🥊.

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✏ Accountability and roles: Agile coach in Healthcare

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I run agile in healthcare training and coach 20-30 teams annually on this journey. Here are the 3 benefits I keep hearing of an agile coach specialized in health.

• Focus: you can explore the world but must focus on getting results fast.
• Momentum: set up team rituals and meetings to ensure progress
• Accountability: set up the discipline of short project loops and measurable goals. It keeps the team accountable with regular review and retrospective sessions.

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You can also invest in some of your team members who are scrum masters or seem to love enabling teams. "Train the trainers" programs for these profiles are also suitable investments.

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✏ Process: Make mandatory problem framing process: 10 P checklist

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You can make this step mandatory even if no innovation process is available. It is the easiest way to save money and time. You must ensure your team is aligned on the problem and has identified the root causes.

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So, run through this checklist, I call it the 10P checklist (one of my preferred exercise with my teams 😍:

1. Who has the problem? What are the root causes?
2. When and where does it happen?
3. Why does it happen? (what are they trying to get done? - their goals or jobs to be done - what are the root causes)
4. Who is impacted by this problem beyond the one mentioned above? (interdependency, downstream players)
5. How big is the problem? How many people/organizations have the problem?
6. How urgent is it to be solved?
7. How frequently does it happen?
8. How costly (money or time) is the problem?
9. Who will be willing to bear the cost of solving this problem?
10. What are the shortcomings of current solutions?

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And remember:

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See you in two weeks. Keep the spark alive, and be intentional :). Did you like this email? Which topic would you like to learn about? I'd love to hear your thoughts.