Open InNOvation

Open innovation was a term popularized by Henry Chesbrough and describes a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology. Many complain that academic medical centers and the sick care ecosystem, by the nature of its culture, has been too closed and unwilling to embrace and practice open innovation. The barriers to sick care and healthcare open innovation are 1) the discrepancies between the academic and medical cultures and the commercial culture, 2) differing business models, 3) different rules and regulations creating disparate ecosystems, and 4) varying ethics that are difficult to reconcile.

Sick care cannot be fixed from inside. We need outside-in help.

Many other countries have policies and systems in place to facilitate academic-industy knowledge exchange. Here are some ways we can do the same:

1. Embrace academic-industry knowledge exchange as the norm, rather than the exception.

2. Remove artificial barriers to collaboration.

3. Create a neutral ground, located at neither the university nor the the firm, to free up innovation from the grasp of the mother ships.

4. Create funding mechanisms to support knowledge exchange programs for graduate students and postdocs.

5. Reconcile the intellectual property issues that pit those who publish or perish with those who want to patent and protect.

6. Create entrepreneurial health professional schools

7. Award promotion and tenure credit for the scholarship of innovation

8. Use the iCorps methodology to get student and faculty entrepreneurs "out of the building"

9. Enforce diversity and inclusion guidelines

10. Break down innovation silos

Dropping reimbursements, dwindling NIH basic research funding, miminal state support for higher ed and changing industrial biomedical business models are creating both threats and opportunities for both sides of the equation to come together. When it comes to innovation, opening doors is a better way than inNOvating.

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