FountainBlue's Blog

Women Leaders in Conversation: Technology To Foster Mentorship in Education

fountainblue — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 01:20:33 +0000

Usha Sekar inspired us all with her career-long dedication toward creating, connecting and caring in a way that adds business value while producing lasting social impact for the good of the community. Usha leverages her phenomenal training and education in a practical way that grows teams and companies and produces results that serve the needs of the customer, and the community overall. Whether she worked in IT at companies like Tandem, Compac and HP or whether she was the CIO at Fujitsu, or working for her own or someone else’s start-up, her focus has always been on finding opportunities and solving problems leveraging technology.
Her current company, Meemli creates a versatile platform for connecting students to mentors on specific subjects ranging from science and math to writing and the arts, serving her passion for the education cause. Currently available in the market by invitation only, Meemli is partnering with nonprofits and foundations such as the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and its Step Up to Algebra program, as well as various California schools and academic institutions like UCSB to provide the type of targeted, one-on-one instruction proven necessary to build skills, build relationships, and ultimately to build confidence. Doing this in a trusted, private, protected system leveraging technologies helps ensures the mentor-mentee relationship, and facilitates growth, inquiry and learning, while also making it scalable to benefit all stakeholders, from mentors to students to teachers to schools and nonprofits. And doing it online will enable more people to participate and contribute as mentors, which is of particular interest to corporations with social responsibility mandates to build employee connections with the community, and serving in a tangible, concrete way, without the cost of commute time.
If you are a potential mentor, student, nonprofit, academic institution or someone else interested in Meemli’s way of leveraging technology to connect students with mentors, giving them the power to help themselves, e-mail them at info@meemli.com or find out more at http://www.meemli.com.

When She Speaks Notes: Expanding Your Circle of Influence

fountainblue — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:59:51 +0000

FountainBlue’s January 20 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series event was on the topic of Expanding Your Circle of Influence, With or Without Direct Authority. Below are notes from the conversation.
We were fortunate to have such inspiring and experienced speakers with a wealth of information and tips on how to influence in a corporate setting as well as in an entrepreneurial setting, how to influence with or without authority, how to do it well, and what to learn when it doesn’t go so well.
They shared their wisdom about the importance of influencing others, and how it is integral to getting business results. Whether they were currently in engineering or marketing or IT or product management, they agreed that influence is a key to successful communication and management, and consistently emphasized that the focus must be on finding a common ground, and navigating in a direction that benefits the group, the team, the organization, rather than focusing on the needs or desires or egos of specific people.
The panel agreed that influence is more about listening than about speaking. It is also about the golden rule – building relationships and treating others with respect. It is also about making commitments and delivering on those commitments, but the relationships, respect and trust are even more important than consistently delivering results. For if you delivered results but others don’t feel heard or don’t trust you, you will be less likely to get opportunities to continue delivering results.
They encouraged us to be clear in the purpose, strategic in aligning others toward that common purpose, passionate in communicating, motivating throughout the journey, persistent and resilient in the execution, despite resistance, and open-minded in considering when that purpose must shift, to best address the interests of all involved. This is not small task, but it becomes easier if we can think from the lens of influence rather than coercion through authority, and do that by building relationships and taking the time to understand the interests and motivations of those you work with and focus conversations on the data to support the shared goal as it will help make things less personal and speak to the more logical, less emotive side of others, while focusing on delivering measurable results.
The panel concurred that where there are people, there will be politics, and provided specific tips, including:
• When you encounter resistance, open-mindedly drill down into who is resisting, why she/he is resisting, and find a common ground to bring her/him in alignment, or at least make him/her feel heard.
• Having a sense of humor can help build trust, relationships and community, and help people feel better connected.
• Know your strengths and your weaknesses and delegate your areas of need to those who might have more skills, experience or passion in that area.
• Make the time commitment to maintain your network and your circle of influence, even when you don’t need something from someone right now. Keeping your own network alive and well will not only help you, it will support the overall ecosystem of relationships between quality people.
• Expanding your circle of influence involves taking measured risk for specific purposes.
• It’s not so much about gender differences, but more about communication styles, but in general, women are more intuitive and men may be more data-driven and detail-oriented and may need more detailed explanations about why plan A is better than plan B.
• Work with your company to align incentives and rewards around a corporate direction and time your communications with compensation plan updates.
• To be effective as a ‘virtual influencer’ (working with global teams), find a way to speak virtually over Skype or other video communication options where you can see a face *and* hear a voice. Also try re-stating and repeating what you heard to confirm the communication, particularly when you speak different primary languages.
It was truly inspiring when our panel suggested that we can all, as leaders, work for a larger cause, a greater good, beyond the immediate need. For example, they mentioned that if the enemy of influence is self-preservation, as a leader, we must watch to ensure that the needs of the greater group are more important than our own personal needs, and that those who approach us with requests are also putting the needs of the larger group in front of their own personal gain. Another example is when they said to make a stand not just for yourself, not just for your team, not just for your organization, but for fairness – to ensure that those who may not be around the table also get their fair share, because it’s the right thing to do.
We conclude by saying that influencing is analogous to being a rider on an elephant’s back. If you’d like to influence its direction, be clear on where you want to go, and know what motivates the elephant and how to communicate that this direction is also in her/his best interest, and motivating her/him throughout the journey, and beyond.

Resources:
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/switch-chip-heath/1100203647
• Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It (5/2/2011) by Jeremie Kubicek http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/leadership-is-dead-jeremie-kubicek
• The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (2/4/2008), by Stephen M. R. Covey http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/speed-of-trust-stephen-mr-covey/1100630815?ean=9781416549000&itm=3&usri=steven+covey
• Smart Trust book by Stephen Covery, to be published January 2012 http://www.coveylink.com/blog/smart-trust-book-to-be-published-january-2012/
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We would like to thank our speakers for FountainBlue’s January 20 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series event was on the topic of Expanding Your Circle of Influence, With or Without Direct Authority:
Facilitator Camille Smith, President and Founder, Work In Progress Coaching
Panelist Claudia Galvan, Lead International Program Management Group, Microsoft Corporation
Panelist Amy Love, Vice President Brand Communications, NetApp
Panelist Mary McDougall, Director, SaaS Strategy & Product Management, BMC Software
Panelist Kristi McGee, Principal Consultant with Office of the CIO and acting Director of Business Applications, Rambus Inc.
Please join us also in thanking our gracious hosts at NetApp.

Women Leaders In Conversation: Deepika Bajaj on Social Media Trends

fountainblue — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:10:04 +0000

In our January 12 Women Leaders in Conversation radio program brought to you by the Monali Jain Foundation, social media strategist, dynamic marketer and woman gamer Deepika Bajaj boldly shared her professional story about all the choices she made in the intersects of her career, how she always embraced opportunities, especially when they were uncomfortable, how she embraced new technologies, new challenges and learned along the way.

As a true entrepreneur, her view is that too many people spend time thinking and contemplating rather than doing and correcting. She was one of the first people to have a cell phone, allowing her to travel internationally and remain connected to important others in her life. As an engineer, she embraced the opportunity to get an MBA specializing in marketing. She launched her own business on a shoestring, and embraced social media as a low-investment, how-impact way to spread the word and build the business. Then she moved into gaming as a rare (and accidental) female gamer, and found that her strengths in technology, marketing, and social media are well leveraged in her current company. As an active blogger and expert in social media, Deepika makes the following recommendations for professional women (and men):

Embrace the possibilities of what social media can provide, rather than resisting it and pointing to counter-examples of its effectiveness. If you don’t join the crowd, you will be left in the dust, as the social media revolution will continue to gather momentum.
Social media is a great way to make your voice heard and impacts your career, your brand, and even the political structure of countries. Never underestimate the power of the written word in real-time communication, shared in community, through social media.
Casual gaming will really take off – and more women play casual games.
The new way of communicating will be more focused on the whole person, a 360 degree view of someone in authentic wholeness. Different generations will have different levels of comfort on how social media will fit into their lives, but the younger generations will have much less fuzzy a line between what’s public and what’s private. Social media will make it easier for everyone to share both.
Get on LinkedIn to share your professional profile, whether you’re in transition or not. Get on Twitter to hear what’s on people’s minds and follow influencers. Join FaceBook to share with others in community. And start blogging if you have content you’d like to share, and would like to start conversations on things that matter to you.

In the end, Deepika says that life is something that you design, with change the biggest constant. She encourages us to 1) be open to possibilities that will stretch us and 2) think how communicating who we are and what we do through social media can open up more possibilities for us.

Contact Deepika at deepikabajaj.com

Technology to Connect and Empower Caretakers

fountainblue — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:09:09 +0000

Our January 19 Women Leaders in Conversation topic was Technology to Connect and Empower Caretakers with Geetha Rao, PhD, Springborne Life Sciences; Vice President of Strategy and Risk Management, Triple Ring Technologies.
Serial entrepreneur, community activist, and ground-breaking, business-minded technologist Dr. Geetha Rao candidly shared her career path, from civil engineering to medical device entrepreneurship, from safety and risk management to business management and outreach. A thread of her career is centered around better serving people, patients and caregivers, through the use of technology. Over the past 15 years in the medical device industry, she has seen how technologies have better served doctors, surgeons and hospital administrators than they have providers like nurses and lay-caregivers. But innovations in medical device technologies, advancements in IT, networking and software, the rising costs of healthcare and other factors have shifted the focus from the high-investment, high-stake, treatment intensive care of the very ill to a wider, broader treatment of the less ill, with a broader impact on the overall health of a community.
But much has to be done to facilitate this happening, including the following:
• A broader and deeper collaboration between entrepreneurial innovators and the larger companies such as the Baxters, Medtronics and J&Js out there with the markets and channels and resources to package, manufacturing and distribute these innovations into market which would welcome them.
• More collaboration between software IT giants such as the Intels and Qualcomms out there and healthcare companies so we can leverage the software, database, and networking advances in the high tech space and apply it for healthcare needs.
• A balance between privacy and information access and policy to support that balance so that it’s predictable for all parties.
• A collaboration between patients, caregivers, providers, hospitals, government and all other stakeholders, to help facilitate an electronic health care standard which is adopted, accepted and implemented as an integral part of the health care system.
Geetha mentioned the following resources which are supporting patients and caregivers in encouraging this shift toward lower-cost, more effective treatment of the masses:
• Entrepreneurial events that facilitate conversation and bring people in community:
o VLAB http://www.vlab.org,
o Bio2Device Group http://www.bio2device.org,
o Astia http://www.astia.org and
o FountainBlue http://www.fountainblue.biz.
• Contract research and innovation lab Triple Ring Technologies http://www.tripleringtech.com. Attend their monthly MedTech Frontier series to find out more about this Newark-based organization.
• Patient community resources which connect patients and encourages the sharing of information and resources and facilitates collaborative and proactive action.
o Patients Like Me http://www.patientslikeme.com
PatientsLikeMe is committed to putting patients first. We do this by providing a better, more effective way for you to share your real-world health experiences in order to help yourself, other patients like you and organizations that focus on your conditions.
o CureTogether http://www.curetogether.com
The smarter way to find the best treatments. Get access to millions of ratings comparing the real-world
performance of treatments across 590 health conditions.
o Everyday Heath http://www.everydayhealth.com
EverydayHealth.com is a leading provider of online health information. We’re here to help you manage your own and your family’s conditions and overall well-being through personalized advice, tools, and communities. We’re committed to bringing you the most credible and relevant health information available online, and to giving you the best possible user experience. Our information is easy to understand and incorporate into your life every day.
o WebMD http://www.webmd.com
WebMD provides valuable health information, tools for managing your health, and support to those who seek information. You can trust that our content is timely and credible.
The bottom line is that there has been a lot of movement over the last decade in enabling technology to empower patients and caregivers alike. And patients and caregivers will play a critical role in ensuring that they get continued access to technology advancements that could help in their diagnostic, treatment, and management of care for themselves and those they care for.

Women Leaders In Conversation: Deepika Bajaj on Social Media Trends

fountainblue — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:57:20 +0000

Embrace the possibilities of what social media can provide, rather than resisting it and pointing to counter-examples of its effectiveness. If you don’t join the crowd, you will be left in the dust, as the social media revolution will continue to gather momentum.
Social media is a great way to make your voice heard and impacts your career, your brand, and even the political structure of countries. Never underestimate the power of the written word in real-time communication, shared in community, through social media.
Casual gaming will really take off – and more women play casual games.
The new way of communicating will be more focused on the whole person, a 360 degree view of someone in authentic wholeness. Different generations will have different levels of comfort on how social media will fit into their lives, but the younger generations will have much less fuzzy a line between what’s public and what’s private. Social media will make it easier for everyone to share both.
Get on LinkedIn to share your professional profile, whether you’re in transition or not. Get on Twitter to hear what’s on people’s minds and follow influencers. Join FaceBook to share with others in community. And start blogging if you have content you’d like to share, and would like to start conversations on things that matter to you.

Contact Deepika at deepikabajaj.com

Robotics in MedTech

fountainblue — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:52:21 +0000

FountainBlue’s December 12 Life Science Entrepreneurs’ Forum, was our final life science forum and was on the topic of Robotics in MedTech. Below are notes from the conversation.
By definition, Robots are devices that automatically perform complicated, often repetitive, tasks or are a mechanism guided by automatic controls. These tasks are ones where human activities are augmented or replaced by automatic or semi-automatic devices. The robotics field can be broken down into areas of body interaction (which would include surgical robots, prosthetics, end-effect robots) Power Source (which includes luggable and fixed robots), Movement Detection (which includes programmed movement and myoelectric), as well as Patient Benefits (which includes vertical wheelchairs, stance control). See the attached chart on the medical robotics landscape, courtesy of Tibion.
Tibion offers a wearable robotic device for augmenting muscle and balance functions through sensors and software, and represented the movement detection category on our panel. Restoration Robotics, which is developing and commercializing a state-of-the-art image-guided system (ARTAS™ System) that enables follicular unit extraction and represents the body interaction space, Accel Biotech, which does product development for medical, diagnostic, biodefense and biotech products and represents products from the movement detection, patient benefits and body interaction space and ISS Robodoc, which allows operators to specify a task and the device performs all the actions necessary to complete the task such as drilling a cavity for an implant from CT data, and represents the body interaction space.
Our panelists spoke eloquently both about how they got into the business, for personal and professional reasons, what their companies are doing, as well as the obstacles and opportunities ahead. Below is a summary of advice and comments about the industry overall.
• With the advancement of technologies in software, hardware, mechanical engineering, databases/business intelligence, networks and integration of all, there are many more MedTech opportunities for successful businesses now than ever before.
• With that said, the aging and more affluent global population/potential customer base, and the demand for more versatile, customizable solutions will dramatically increase to serve an ever-growing global market where there are needs for robots to do everything from body interaction to power sourcing to movement detection to patient benefit.
• Entrepreneurs experienced in this area have withstood the financial/economic ebbs and flows of the valley, particularly over the past decade, and seen the rapid rise and fall of technologies-looking-for-a-market. They are best able to see what’s next, based on market needs and customer feedback/demands and are best positioned to leverage existing technologies to serve these needs, many times integrating proven technologies, or applying them in a new way for a new purpose or market.
• Focus more on incremental improvements on proven technologies, for that’s far easily to forecast and plan for than disruptive changes, and you’re far more likely to encounter disruptive changes if you focus on the incremental ones.
In fact, a disruptive change may involve using existing technology in a new way in a new industry rather than inviting a new technology and solution from scratch, which is much less tested, much harder to get adoption and approval and funding and customers.
• Always start with the market need and consider regulatory and reimbursement factors as well as social and cultural issues rather than focus on building the technology and waiting for the patients and doctors to come.
• Design solutions that make therapists more efficient, one that is easy to understand and adopt, one that makes it easier for them to run their clinic as a business.
• Focus on solutions which make sense, and bring patients to caregivers when the need is to specific, too mission-critical. For example, instead of doing remote surgery at a battle site, invest in quickly getting patients to care centers with far more people and resources for customized treatment.
Our panelists agreed that there are tremendous opportunities ahead in this space:
• Integrating software engineering, data analytics, medical device production and pharmaceutical research can help accelerate the development of custom treatments for specific patients and needs. Indeed, it can do much more than that!
• There are huge opportunities in applications of robotics in food production, research (to find a more versatile, nutritious corn for example), distribution, treatment, etc.
• Robotics could enable rapid, customized diagnostics, in the near term in the areas of staph infection,
• Industrial robots did not take off in the US, due more to market/people resistance than technology implementation hurdles. As such, widespread adoption industrial robotics solutions is more prevalent outside the US. If we can change the mindset of the users and adopters, we can welcome and adopt industrial robotics solutions, factory automation at a next level, and once again become more competitive in the manufacturing/operations space. If not, we can design further industrial robot automations for international customers and markets.
• Investigate the convergence of cameras (imaging), networks/mobile, data analytics, etc. as it applies to quickly diagnosing and treating patients in an efficient, customized way.
• Investigate how gaming, sensors and augmentation will intersect with robotics and the opportunities therein.
• See where materials science, medtech, data analytics, and robotics intersect and the implications on how we can better serve our patients.
• To find opportunities to apply robotics, look at what repetitive or dangerous tasks should be done efficiently and precisely and how it can be automated in an efficient (time and money) way to an audience (like patients and doctors) who may not embrace technology. It must be simple to understand and use.
• Each of the robotics categories from body interaction to Power Source to Movement Detection to Patient Benefits may all be applied to how robots can support an aging population to assist movement-impaired patients limited through age-related physical degeneration, diseases or congenital limitations:
o Surgical robots, prosthetics, end-effect robots
o Luggable and fixed robots
o Programmed movement and myoelectric
o vertical wheelchairs, stance control
In the end, complex automation is the key, leveraging technology (software, devices, databases, networks, etc), but it must be integrated into a simple, sustainable solution, easily managed, to serve complex problems for specific users/customers/needs.
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Please join us in thanking our panelists for our final life science forum, on the topic of Robotics in MedTech:
Facilitator Jack Moorman, LeVaunt, LLC
Presenting Entrepreneur Robert Horst, Ph.D., Vice President of R&D & Cofounder, Tibion
Presenting Entrepreneur Mike Ouren, Clinical Development Manager, Restoration Robotics
Presenting Entrepreneur Bruce Richardson, CEO, Accel Biotech
Presenting Entrepreneur Dr. Ramesh C. Trivedi, President, Calbiomed International, Inc.

Leadership in a Time of Accelerated Change

fountainblue — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:00:24 +0000

FountainBlue’s December 9 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series was on the topic of Leadership in a Time of Accelerated Change. Below are notes from the conversation.
Whether our panelists represented a household-name tech company or an emerging start-up, were part of an executive team or the CEO, they had many traits in common:
• They consistently and consciously embraced change, and are often times the instigators for change.
• The change they advocated was always in a forward direction, for themselves, for their teams, for their organizations, for their industry.
• If change did not happen in a productive way, they found a way around, through, across and over the obstacles.
• They made a business case for each change, and worked with all the stakeholders so that they can embrace that change.
• They are authentic and human. It’s not that they never had self-limiting beliefs, but they focused on pushing past that; it’s not that they’ve always succeeded, it’s that they keep growing and learning from every experience.
• They each knew their ‘walking points’, junctures in their lives and careers where they made a conscious choice in a new direction for a strategic reason.
With all that said, leading change is never easy, particularly at a time when standing still and being complacent, something that previously worked for some, can be a death sentence now. Below is advice our panelists shared about how to embrace change:
• Accept change as a way of life, the real constant, and learn from every change.
• Lead change in a direction which makes sense strategically for yourself, your team, your organization, your industry.
• Leverage your strengths and relationships to make changes stick, to show the results of change, to continue to drive change and build engagement around it.
• Embrace change especially when it’s uncomfortable. There may be many more advancement opportunities during a down-turn or a downsizing than during a time of rapid growth for the company or in the economy overall.
• See the opportunity in every change, and the changes with each opportunity.
• Change is a given, but misery is optional, so it’s how you look at change and manage it.
• The constants of love, relationship, intimacy, community, the need for money will always be there, even if the tools, the environment and methodologies may change rapidly.
• As change accelerates, focus on the view from the customer and provide products and services which serve their current and anticipated needs.
• Lean forward toward your passion.
• Drive efficient, measurable results and convince others it’s in their best interest to do so.
• Find the sweet spot where innovation, business and technology intersect, and develop practical and sustainable ways to deliver quality products and services to your customers.
• Be strategic about what you do for whom (your prioritized customer base), and get feedback on your plan from trusted, knowledgeable others.
• Embrace and learn from failures for success is the enemy of change.
• It is far easier to embrace change that you create, than change imposed on you by others, but it may be better for all to do the latter.
• Listen to your customers about any changes they may request with your products or services and take the time to understand why they have these specific requests or needs.
Our panelists had the following predictions about technology trends, and invite us to think about the implications of these trends on ourselves and our organizations.
• There will be many more touch screens used in so many different ways, and cursors and keyboards may be less prominent.
• There will be ever-increasing demands for immediate response to customized needs, leveraging software and devices.
• Users will be more demanding, and those who consider what the user experiences and how to best serve the user’s comfort, interests and needs will best succeed.
• Users can more quickly engage with trusted communities in targeted ways.
• Entertainment will meet mobile will meet social media in many ways.
Recommended Reading:
• Play to Your Strengths: Stacking the Deck to Achieve Spectacular Results for Yourself and Others by Andrea Sigetich and Carol Leavitt
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change by Clayton Christensen and Deaver Brown
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
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Please join us in thanking our speakers for taking the time to share their advice and thoughts and to eBay for hosting us.
Facilitator Amy Gonzales, Director, Women Unlimited
Panelist Erna Arnesen, Head of Global Services Channels and Alliances, Cisco
Panelist Deepika Bajaj, Marketing Director, Fierce Wombat Games, Inc.,
Panelist Elisa Jagerson, Founder and CEO, Speck Design
Panelist Leila Pourhashemi, Director, Technical Services, PayPal, an eBay company

Materials Innovation in Clean Tech

fountainblue — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 17:42:56 +0000

FountainBlue’s December 5 Clean Energy Entrepreneurs’ Forum was on the topic of Materials Innovations in Clean Tech. Below are notes from the conversation.
Our panelists spoke passionately about the opportunities for materials innovation, and how it can change clean energy offerings that are both practical and affordable for customers like utilities, corporations, manufacturers and homeowners.
Below are some thoughts on the opportunities ahead for materials innovation in clean tech:
• Develop materials and solutions which would help manage the peaks and valleys brought by renewable energy getting into the grid. This will become increasingly important.
• In the same token, develop materials innovations which fit within existing infrastructure and even make the infrastructure more flexible, more scalable.
• Consider automating basic, needed services which use fewer resources, like anything from window-cleaning to car and battery maintenance.
• Use plentiful, inexpensive, proven materials and scale manufacturing and development using these materials.
• Consider developing solutions which are closer to the ‘load’, where the customer demand is greatest. This may mean many micro- solutions for energy management.
• Adapt current materials which make products smaller, lighter, and more durable under extreme conditions, and its applications in the clean energy space.
Below is advice from our experienced panelists:
• Our panelists cautioned entrepreneurs about investing *too* much time and money into the development of a novel, groundbreaking material, and suggested instead to look at proven materials and adapting them to new purposes, to new markets, using new geometries, new manufacturing processes, new composites/combinations, etc. Not only would doing so decrease the likelihood of creating a product or service more quickly for a proven market and paying customer, but it would also be easier to seek funding and partnerships.
• Develop processes and solutions which would make production of your materials cost-effectively, so that you reach grid parity and customers would get the ROI.
• Make it easy for customers to select your solution, changing from their current option. People want to be earth-friendly, but the financial commitment up-front and the technical/hassle-factor is a hurdle to adopting ‘cleaner’ options.
• Leverage partnerships with academics, entrepreneurs, corporates, etc and collaborate to develop new solutions, distribute them to new markets and channels, etc
• Know your area of specialty and work with others to create win-win partnerships for everything from development to manufacturing to distribution and funding.
• Know your market and sell to your market. Prioritize which markets you will sell to when and know why.
• Provide offerings which could withstand extreme conditions – weather, heat, chemicals, etc. and also last for long periods of time, like a decade or two.
• Follow basic business principles: have a great idea and prove it through measurable outcomes based on aggressive milestones and timelines.
• Consider aerospace and military applications for your materials innovation.
• Collaborate to influence policy to be more friendly to innovations in this space.
• Have your finger on market pulse and focus on the needs and feedback of your customers.

In the end, entrepreneurs who will succeed in this space will focus more on incremental innovations than on creating/identifying a game-changing new material, more about business models than on ‘rocket science’, more about producing real value to paying customers and scaling to meet the current and anticipated needs of a global marketplace.

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We would like to thank our speakers for FountainBlue’s December 5 Clean Energy Entrepreneurs’ Forum on the topic of Materials Innovations in Clean Tech:
Facilitator Jill Weir, Product Manager, TE Connectivity
Panelist Scott Elrod, Vice President, Director of Hardware Systems Laboratory, PARC
Panelist Alissa Peterson, Director, Product Marketing and Business Development, Primus Power
Presenting Entrepreneur Phillip Roberts, CEO and Founder, Ionex Energy Storage Systems Inc.
Please join us also in thanking our hosts at PARC.

Personalized Medicine

fountainblue — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:29:31 +0000

FountainBlue’s November 14 Life Science Entrepreneurs’ Forum was on the topic of Personalized Medicine, Biomarkers, Invitro Diagnostics: The Science Advances, The Business Opportunities, The Cultural Dilemmas. Below are notes from the conversation.
We were fortunate to have a wide range of perspectives and experiences on our panel, representing decades of expertise in personalized medicine, biopharma, oncology, infectious diseases, internal medicine, proteomics, and optics. They each spoke eloquently about the evolution of the personalized medicine industry and the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Our panelists are quite bullish about the opportunities in personalized medicine, remarking on the great progress made over the last decade or two, leveraging revolutionary technologies, research and other innovations and success stories from companies such as Cepheid, Genomic Health, Roche and Gilead. As we move from the first generation of non-specific diagnosis focused on treating symptoms (all typical of health care today), we gravitate toward solutions which require information correlation, providing organized therapies targeting those who would be most responsive to them, based on detailed analysis and research prior to treatment, known as translational medicine. Examples of such include digital imaging, genetic predisposition testing, and clinical genomics. The longer-term objectives for personalized medicine might include disease prevention and effective chronic disease management, and might leverage molecular medicine, CA diagnostics, pre-symptomatic treatment and lifetime treatment. (Source: Richard Bakalar, MD, IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences, November 3, 2004.)
Based on a Bernard Associates October 2003 report published in PharmExec.com, the opportunities in personalized medicine might include the following:
• Addressing patients with adverse event risk
• Serving treatment non-responders
• Serving treatment low-responders
• Introducing solutions to market with faster approvals
• Recruiting patients with less effective, more expensive drugs to new treatment
• Increasing use of drugs for diagnosed patients not treated
• Expanding treatments to new diseases and subgroups
• Diagnosing earlier and leveraging preventive treatments
• Enhancing patient compliance
• Securing better reimbursements for best-in-class drugs
Our panelists made the following comments and advice:
• Because of the nature of the industry, personalized medicine is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, with opportunities for success for only the most committed and resilient.
• Segmenting the patient base (high/low responders, high/low likelihood of recurrence for example) will provide better treatment for the patients, better data for the practitioners, better results for the payers and insurers alike.
• Making solutions easy for the physicians to use, for patients to take, will increase the overall effectiveness of the treatment.
o Getting quick test results will help doctors more quickly make diagnosis and recommend treatments, and also increase the likelihood that the patients will begin treatment. An example is TB testing which currently may take a week, but may eventually take an hour or two, while the patient is still in the office.
o Educate physicians about how to fold these easy-to-implement solutions into their day-to-day practice cost-effectively, and within reimbursement requirements and regulations.
• Focus on creating actionable testing to striate the patient base and recommend treatments based on patient-specific data.
• Create more cost-effective, more effective alternatives to current traditional treatments to 1) serve a more niche market, or a larger market, 2) save costs for patients and insurers, 3)
• Collaborate with clinicians to create value-based pricing and a more receptive regulatory environment conducive to more effective translational medicine.
• Leverage experts in databases and automated systems who can analyze data and recommend treatments, help research differences and similarities in patient and disease and further the research and effectiveness of personalized medicine overall.
• Research families/chapters of diseases as well as types of patients and their correlations with disease susceptibility, with an eye to prevention and treatment.
• There are huge opportunities around treatment resistance – whether it’s a low-responding patient or a patient which develops resistance to treatment over time.
o If it’s delayed resistance, make sure that lab data is current, rather than that taken at the onset of treatment.
o With that said, the difference between samples taken at the beginning of treatment and after the resistance has developed might give insights about the disease, the treatment and/or the patient and classes of each.
• Combination therapies might address the needs of low/non responders, or those who have developed resistance following initial treatment.
As the industry evolves, here are some critical questions to consider:
• Will patients be willing to pay higher prices for treatments more specific to their profile?
• Will diagnostics become more valued and more expensive as people begin to recognize the importance of detailed patient data prior to treatment?
• Will pharma continue to the most influential stakeholder?
• How can patient groups, advocacy groups, clinical collaboration groups, insurers, pharma and other stakeholders better collaborate?
• Will it be cost-effective enough to provide conclusive data which physicians would embrace?
• Will physicians have the time and inclination to embrace new diagnostics and personalized treatments? What are some practical financial incentives for them to do so?
• Will payers band together to insist on better diagnostics and more specialized treatment options based on more sophisticated diagnostics? How will payers work with insurers and physicians and others to make this so?
• What is the most efficient way to measure and communicate ROI and overall savings for diagnosis and treatments?
• Who will fund entrepreneurial innovations in this area, and if it’s not funded, how will the industry continue to evolve?
• How will global solutions and markets evolve?
Whatever the opportunities and questions ahead, we’re in agreement that personalized medicine is not to be swept aside: it is a business opportunity and there is a real need to deliver optimal treatments for patients, and benefit stakeholders across the value chain.
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We are grateful to our panelists for FountainBlue’s November 14 Life Science Entrepreneurs’ Forum was on the topic of Personalized Medicine, Biomarkers, Invitro Diagnostics: The Science Advances, The Business Opportunities, The Cultural Dilemmas:
Facilitator Audrey S. Erbes, Ph.D., Principal, Erbes & Associates
Panelist Michael Bates, M.D., Vice President, Oncology Research and Development at Cepheid
Panelist Dean Schorno, Chief Financial Officer, Genomic Health
Presenting Entrepreneur Giacomo Vacca, Ph.D., Founder & CEO, Kinetic River
Please join us in thanking our speakers for taking the time to share their advice and thoughts.

Tips for Enlarging Your Sandbox

fountainblue — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:59:31 +0000

FountainBlue’s November 11 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series was on the topic of Tips for Enlarging Your Sandbox: Learn to play with people who don’t act right (like you). Below are notes from the conversation.
We were fortunate to have a wide range of perspectives and experiences on our panel, representing women from different educational and cultural backgrounds, from different departments, with different experiences and skills. But they had many things in common:
• They constantly strive to learn and improve and make things better for themselves and for those around them.
• They keep raising the bar for themselves, electing to feel uncomfortable rather than settling and being complacent.
• They are succeeding in ways big and small in their personal and professional lives.
• They are constantly giving back, engaging others in their networks and creating bigger, broader infrastructure, supporting the success of more women and men.
• They do not shrink from daunting and intimidating tasks, but always rise up and find a way to create a bigger plan, a collaborative success, and particularly gravitating to challenging tasks and groups.
With the qualities above (note how they are all inter-related and feed upon themselves), it is no wonder that our panelists are so successful, and poised for further success. Our panelists started by commenting on why they thought expanding their sandbox, being open to working with people who did not think and act like you do, was beneficial to themselves personally and to their organizations. They mentioned factors such as:
• Diversity within an organization will fuel innovation and entrepreneurship.
o Seeing something or someone from another point of view will open you up to new experiences and new thoughts which may not have occurred to you before.
• Embracing the viewpoints of others will help distribute the successes, the challenges, the recognition. True leaders will know how to integrate and embrace these varying perspectives for the good of all.
• As we becoming increasingly more global, embracing the viewpoints of others will help us better serve our markets, our partners, our staff, our customers.
• Those who better embrace the varying perspectives of others have a more tolerant, more positive, more constructive outlook on life, which serves them personally and professionally.
• They will also have a larger network to rely on and collaborate with!
Below is some advice they have for those of us interested in expanding our sandbox.
• Be strategic about who you are, clear on what your brand stands for, which must be in alignment with your personal core values. You must first know your strengths and weaknesses, your goals and objectives in order to do so.
• Build a support system and network, including key mentors, who can help you think through and get to where you want to go.
• Leverage social media to spread your message, but manage it carefully to ensure the integrity and consistency of the message.
• Dare to show up, to take a leap of faith, especially when you’re feeling uncomfortable. Showing courage despite the fear is the only way to follow your dreams.
• Find a learning in every uncomfortable situation. Leverage your networks to get the support you need to better ensure learnings and better position yourself for success.
• Know what you’re doing and add measurable value along the way, while you’re connecting people from different backgrounds and mindsets to the cause. Essential to this is the ability to communicate that value, and engage strategic others to also engage, to best serve common interests.
• Make all parties look good and feel like they’ve created a bigger whole together.
• Speak the language of your diverse stakeholders, and know what motivates them before you speak with them.
• Learn from your life experiences as much as your planned career path and challenges.
• When you are feeling uncomfortable working with people who don’t think and act like you, manage your emotional response and bubble up to think through what are you trying to accomplish, what is motivated all the key stakeholders, and how can you work together for a collaborative win.
• The more impossible things you accomplish, the hungrier you become for more challenges, and the more likely your management team will provide them for you. Even if you fail, learn from it, and see it as a necessary stepping stone to success.
The bottom line is to find something you really enjoy doing, and then focus on delivering value to the customer and on how you can work with a diverse team to deliver just that.
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We would like to thank our panelists for FountainBlue’s November 11 When She Speaks, Women in Leadership Series was on the topic of Tips for Enlarging Your Sandbox: Learn to play with people who don’t act right (like you):
Facilitator Rossella Derickson, Performance and Culture Strategist, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Panelist Sabina Burns, Sr. Director Corporate Marketing, Synopsys
Panelist Gina Diaz, Director, License Management Services (LMS) Group, Oracle
Panelist Monali Jain, Head of Salesforce.com Engineering at PayPal, eBay
Panelist Natascha Thomson, Sr. Director, Social Media Audience Marketing, SAP AG
Please join us also in thanking our hosts at Synopsys.