The Culture of Collaboration

Collaborate to Fix Venture Capital and Innovation Ecosystem

With a severe liquidity squeeze and a withered initial public offering (IPO) market, the venture capital industry and entrepreneurs face incredible challenges. The infrastructure to take companies public has nearly collapsed.

 

“The ecosystem is broken,” Judy Estrin told an audience at the Tech Policy Summit this week in San Mateo, California. Judy, serial entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of Cisco, was referring to the ecosystem comprising venture capitalists, investment bankers, universities, entrepreneurs, scientists, customers and others that has launched scores of innovative and profitable companies including Intel, Apple, Cisco and Google over the last forty years.

 

Judy has become a crusader for innovation, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book. While there have been “exit” opportunities for venture-backed companies in recent years, those exits have been almost entirely mergers and acquisitions (M&A). “M&A is not enough to spur innovation,” Judy insists. Therefore, we must fix the innovation ecosystem and repair the IPO market to regain innovation leadership.

 

In her book, Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2009), Judy chronicles the breakdown of the innovation ecosystem.  She argues that sustainable innovation never happens in a vacuum. “It is not just a flash of brilliance from a lone scientist, nor is it simply the result of a group going offsite to brainstorm and play team-building games.” Judy also quotes Danny Hillis, former vice president of research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering, as saying essentially that the key is not only to create the “soup” where people brainstorm, but also to develop a system that translates their ideas into something effective. Clearly, Judy believes that collaboration is key to innovation.

 

Collaboration is also key to fixing the innovation ecosystem. Let’s face it. Greed-fueled star culture helped break the ecosystem. To fix it, we must recruit and promote collaborators throughout the ecosystem. This means funding entrepreneurial teams focused on the fundamentals of building great companies. It also means rebuilding the public trust that companies are rooted in innovation rather than hype. It also means changing expectations to embrace long-term growth over short-term returns.  

Telehealth Revisited

Telehealth is back on radar screens of policy makers, health care professionals, engineers and marketers. As we rethink healthcare economics and delivery systems, technology advances are enabling new approaches and better execution of old approaches. Telehealth can enable healthcare access for underserved populations including rural areas, inner city areas, isolated regions, developing countries, and prisons.

 

 Telepresence creates new opportunities for virtual consultations to approximate face-to-face encounters between providers and patients and among providers. Tandberg and Polycom, established vendors in  telehealth, now offer telepresence for healthcare. Polycom announced last month at the American Telemedicine Association 14th Annual Meeting and Exposition that the Michigan Department of Corrections is using Polycom telepresence for everything from tele-psychiatry to tele-nephrology.  Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group has developed HealthPresence, which combines Cisco TelePresence with patient health data captured by connected medical devices such as stethoscopes and vital signs monitors.

 

In the late 1990’s, I conducted research in telehealth and wrote the “Personal Telemedicine” column for Telemedicine Today magazine. The magazine allowed me to write about every aspect of telehealth with an emphasis on how the tools and delivery mechanisms impact people. The name of the column played off my first book, Personal Videoconferencing (Manning/Prentice Hall, 1996). Since many of the telehealth topics I researched then are now re-emerging, I’ll share one column that’s still available online. It’s called "Twenty Minutes in the Life of a Tele-Home Health Nurse," which appeared in the December, 1997 issue of Telemedicine Today. You can read the column here.