Inside the Innovation Mindset

How game-changing innovation became ingrained in the company culture at Syapse.

“Innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.“

— Steven Johnson, Science author & media theorist

Technology firms are, by their nature, innovative—a breakthrough idea spawns a company that goes on to change the world. Or at least an industry.?

But an innovative concept or insight is one thing. Cultivating and maintaining an enterprise-wide innovation ethos, whereby employees and stakeholders are empowered to look at every challenge as an opportunity to “think outside the box,” is something very different.?

Egos get in the way. Inertia takes over. Individuals are reluctant to offer up creative ideas, for fear of being critiqued. Or they may be wary of commenting honestly when a superior tosses a suggestion into the ring.?

In short, making innovation an ongoing, everyday mindset is hard. And it takes a lot more than setting up a ping-pong table or gaming console in the break room.?

Syapse, a company founded on converting real-world data into insights for health systems and Life Sciences companies, has found a way to foster a true culture of innovation throughout its organization.?

It’s called, aptly, the Innovation Incubator. And unlike “Hackathons,” which many tech companies have adopted, the Syapse approach is fully inclusive. Everyone from leadership to product managers, clinicians, IT people and the marketing team are encouraged to participate and build on each other’s ideas, never losing sight of the ultimate goal—furthering the mission of using real-world evidence to enhance patient care.

INNOVATION INCUBATOR. ORIGINS AND OPPORTUNITIES.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the Syapse leadership team went looking for ways to keep its remote workforce constructively engaged.?

Among other things, they hosted their first-ever Innovation Incubator, a five-day event conceived to give cross-functional teams the time and space to be creative.?

“As a judge, I was in awe of the ingenuity, forward-thinking and big ideas the team brought forth during the event,” said Vinod Subramanian, Chief Data & Product Development Officer at Syapse.

“It was clear these ideas were sitting in the proverbial “parking lot”, and needed dedicated time, resources and motivation to flourish.”

So successful was that inaugural event that the Syapse team started riffing on how to grow, expand and make “Innovation Incubation” more of an ongoing practice versus a yearly or bi-annual meeting of the minds.?

A little over a year later, innovation has become a mindset at Syapse, a core belief that’s fostering new and better ways of doing things, and fulfilling the promise of that old tagline from Apple—“Think Different.”?

SO WHAT EXACTLY IS AN INNOVATION MINDSET?

"Our goal was to create a space for all employees regardless of job title to work cross-functionally to produce ideas that can later be added to our roadmap. In addition to ground breaking ideas, the Innovation mindset generates incredible energy and enthusiasm throughout our organization.”?

— Jennifer Ireland, Director of People at Syapse

Vinod Subramanian is very much a believer in the idea that innovation means dropping fear of the unknown, and being unafraid to fail. Creativity is about taking risks and wearing your heart on your sleeve every day.?

Organizations where people feel inhibited are places where innovation dies.?

So the company facilitates a culture of openness and inclusiveness—there are no bad ideas and all are welcome to participate, build on each other’s contributions, and invent better ways to solve problems for customers.?

Vinod also believes that innovation is not something you turn on or off at will, but rather an ongoing practice, a way of thinking critically and differently about, well, pretty much everything. Once you train your mind to be that inquisitive, ideas flow naturally and creativity flourishes.?

Syapse had always been a whiteboarding kind of place so it was no great leap for participants to bring their collaborative styles to the virtual world of Zoom, Slack, Google Meet, WebEx or any other platforms they chose.?

“We let people use whatever tools and technologies they are most comfortable with,” added Subramanian. “Essentially, you are one click away from innovation or ideation.”

“This idea is a game-changer. It allows us to organize and leverage real-world data dynamically in our platform to create multidimensional, high-fidelity projections to support our evolving use cases. This new innovation will enhance the power of real-world data in real-time, allowing our stakeholders to see it in action.”

— Amol Bhalla, MD, PhD, Director of Clinical Informatics at Syapse

REAL-WORLD IMPACT?

The Innovation Incubator concept may still be in its infancy, but it’s already had a significant impact. Two ideas in particular have emerged and are now baked into the Syapse strategic road map for 2021 and beyond.?

The first centers around leveraging technologies such as Machine Learning and AI to make existing data available quicker and more cost effectively. What once took months can now be achieved in a matter of days. Empowering health systems to access and use real-world evidence that quickly generates better outcomes for them—and for their patients.?

The second idea was to look beyond oncology—the primary focus area for Syapse—and determine how to apply real-world data to virtually any other medical discipline. The team built a model and today they’re developing a product for roll-out in 2022.?

These ideas, and myriad others, came from individuals working together, thinking creatively, and overcoming resource constraints to bring new concepts to life in ways that enable real-world evidence to influence care patterns, treatment outcomes and to support clinical trials.?

Many companies talk about innovation but few have figured out a way to harness the power of creativity by practicing an innovative mindset every day. At Syapse that mindset is now ingrained in the company culture, demonstrating that all employees at all levels can be empowered to think differently about challenges, and then suggest ideas in an open, highly collaborative environment, without fear of failure or criticism.?

Another way to think of innovation is that it’s a journey. One whose genesis can be traced to a simple idea—a remark tossed out in a conversation or hastily typed into a chat window—that days or months later reveals itself as a game-changing invention. Or a life-saving outcome.?

At Syapse the innovation journeys continue. That’s good for business, good for customers—and, by extension, good for all of us.?