Shapes of Innovation

??????Written by our 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) Kathy Zamarripa .

The Office of Entrepreneurship (OE) at Mayo Clinic aims to educate students of all ages about different paths of entrepreneurship. During the summer of 2022, I participated in the OE as Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF), learning about innovation, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship in the life sciences. Here are three real-world examples of how innovation molds companies into their next evolution, and how it resembles what I’ve learned over the summer.

Patient-Centric Problem Solving

One thing I’ve learned from the OE is that there are two types of business owners. One type thinks nothing more can be done, so they offer temporary solutions to the immediate problems. Then there are the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the modern-day heroes. These people take a problem and create a transformative solution. Innovators like Tim Smith, founder, and CEO of Avazzia technology, are driven to create and engineer. After retiring, Mr. Smith saw a need for better and more effective treatment for patients in chronic pain. With his background in engineering and manufacturing technology that sent people into space, Mr. Smith was well on his way to developing hand-held devices cleared by the FDA for noninvasive, non-pharmaceutical long-lasting pain relief methods.

Devices like the ones designed by Avazzia describe the core values of Mayo Clinic and the OE team; if there’s a way to make patients more comfortable and pain-free - then let’s figure out a way to do it.

Pivot or Persevere

Sometimes innovation doesn’t follow the path we envision in our minds. Hahna Alexander , CEO of SolePower had to rise above failure to find true value in their developed product. At first, SolePower created a shoe that could harness energy from each step that the wearer took. The intent was to then use the energy from the shoe to charge the user's phone. Through customer discovery, SolePower quickly discovered that people would much rather carry around a battery block than wear these shoes. So, SolePower had to pivot their idea. Their team decided to create a “smart shoe.” Every step will generate enough power for sensors, GPS, temperature, motion, and step count. This company took a shoe charger and turned it into a completely wireless life-saving device. ???

The OE has a course that prepares participants for this exact situation. In this course, participants work through a problem to find the best-fit solution, to find product-market fit. This is done by customer discovery interviews, assessing the potential buyers’ pains and gains, and pivoting or updating based on results. That’s exactly what SolePower did to mold their device into a different shape.

Passion for Unconventional Success

Innovation has an obvious place in making the human experience safer and less painful, but does it have a place in making the human experience more enjoyable? Absolutely. Music is instrumental in therapy, marketing, film, and unifying the human race. However, passion alone can only take a musician so far (1). How can passionate musicians become successful? Two companies are making it easier to publicize passionate musicians worldwide. LANDR provides easy access to harmonious development, virtual collaborative efforts, and a sound library for musicians to implement into their creations. Distrokid is a platform that aims to connect undiscovered musicians and record labels; imagine a LinkedIn platform for developing musicians. LANDR and Distrokid are innovative companies improving the careers of artists, therefore, making the human experience for listeners and artists trying to make a living more enjoyable.

The OE empowers people to shape the world they would want for the next generation. Technology is improving by the second. Innovation is how pain can be relieved from the source, essential lives can be protected, and passionate musicians can be fully appreciated. The OE team continues to advocate the importance of getting back up after failing, looking at different perspectives, and fighting to make any passion enjoyable and valuable. These three developing companies give me hope and inspiration to continue pursuing my own personal project. My personal passion project wouldn’t even be a concept if I didn’t have mentors acknowledging my talents and allowing my perceptiveness to shine.

Check out this link to learn how undergraduate students can participate in the next SURF cohort and develop professional development skills by contacting the OE team at [email protected].