Drivers of Physician Entrepreneurship

Physician entrepreneurship continues to expand around the world and refers to doctors and other health professionals pursuing opportunityunder volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions with the goal of creating user/stakeholder/patient defined value through the development and deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation using a VAST business model with the goal of achieving the quintuple aims.

There are many possible reasons why this is happening, but I think it's due to three basic drivers: earning, learning and returning to patients and making the world a better place.

One is the necessity to respond to economic, demographic, regulatory, legal, and societal change, and pressures like an aging population, dropping birth rates, macroeconomic stagnation, and health reform mandates. Entrepreneurs by necessity are also those experiencing divorce, debt or disability.

Unfortunately, while necessity is said to be the mother of invention, it is not necessarily the mother of innovation. Many things need to happen before an idea becomes an invention or, more importantly, an innovation. As a result, there are many orphans. Entrepreneurship by necessity has its dark side.

The second motivator has to do with more basic human factors like greed, fear, ego, career dissatisfaction and the need to express a fundamental entrepreneurial spirit or, particularly later in life, giving back. Culture trumps change. It's critical we don't snuff the pioneering spirit in us all.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, doctors want to help their patients by developing and deploying innovative products, services, systems, and platforms that result in improved outcomes, lower per capita cost, and better patient experiences. In doing so, they satisfy an increasingly important mandate to be good stewards of dwindling societal resources. They are also interested in improving their experience to lessen burnout and dissatisfaction with the practice of medicine.

Doctors are practicing the art of entrepreneurship for many reasons:

1. it helps patients
2. It's fun and challenging
3. It gives them the ability to exercise creativity
4. It creates alignment and engagement with organization
5. The profit motives
6. It creates meaning
7. It satisfies psychic needs
8. It provides another source of external validation
9. It's a way to get outside of your comfort zone
10. It allows you to take more risk
11. The sick care business model is broken and they want to be part of the big fix after feeling ignored and disempowered

12. They must to surthrive

Some think that more doctors are dropping out and that there will be a physician shortage. Maybe or maybe not, but there are strategies to address that possibility

The new corporate model is a distributed entrepreneurial model. Customers and patients today demand products and services personalized or tailored to local needs with embedded quality of life services. Scaling is done first by customer alliances through social media, and later by distributed joint ventures and coopetition. We need the new wave of entrepreneurs to facilitate:

1. A new era for manufacturing enterprises.?New emerging manufacturing technologies (e.g., digital and 3D printing) in small shops or a town’s industrial and innovation hub can bring manufacturing back home. The new twenty-first century corporation can be born virtually anywhere. Single-node factories may be home-based with a global market.
2. New goldmine of innovations and technology.?Universities and other R&D groups have created a large number of new inventions and innovations, mostly lying dormant on the shelves of our researchers and labs, waiting to be commercialized by aspiring entrepreneurs, with minimal up-front costs for licensing.
3. Next wave of economic expansion.?The time is ripe for the new entrepreneurial dream. People are emerging from recent economic disasters with a new appetite for change, and making the world a better place. Gen-Y is approaching the business world with solid personal goals, and expect to create something that is creative, fun, and rewarding.
4. The cost of entrepreneur entry is at an all-time low.?With e-commerce, Internet, and smartphone apps, anyone can be an entrepreneur today for a few hundred dollars, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels. With the global market, the growth opportunity is huge, starting local and scaling at any pace.

The drivers are necessity, emotional satisfaction associated with lifelong learning and purpose.

Physician entrepreneurship will continue to grow rapidly around the world. Regional economic growth, improved health and a rising standard of living will be the result.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA, is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship