The SoPE creation story

The Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE) was founded as a global non-profit in 2011 with the vision of reducing global health outcome disparities through the deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation and entrepreneurship. Our mission is to help members get their ideas to patients using an international, open, chapter network offering education, resources, networks, mentors, experience, peer support and personal and professional development guidance.

We created it because we observed, and the co-founders personally experienced that:

1. Everyone who calls themselves "doctor" wearing a white coat thinks they have a great idea
2. An idea is not an invention or a discovery and it certainly is not a technology, a product or a business that can get that idea to patients. Most of the resulting products and services are incremental improvements at best and solution looking for a problem at worst.
3. Even if the idea had some commercial or value potiential to meet the quintuple aims, most biomedical and clinical actors would have no idea what to do with it
4. There are few formal educational programs that will provide education, resources, networks, mentors, experience, peer support or bioentrepreneurship career guidance.

Here's how to tell your story. It is different than storybranding.

To fill the gap, several of us had an idea in 2008.

At a meeting of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery in Chicago in 2018, we created our plan . With short notice, we were able to find a room to test our idea at 5:30 am (before the drug company free food breakfast event). We created copies of a hand drawn invitation to meet for the inaugural session of what we called the ENTrepreneurs Club. "Do you have an idea but don't know what to do with it?" Find out by coming to our meeting.

I went to the vendor exhibit hall and handed out the flyers to 100 industry sponsors. My colleague, Jim Blakely, went to the registration desk and handed out 100 flyers to attendees inviting them to our meeting the next morning. We waited 24 hours.

60 people attended who enthusiastically urged us to move forward with our ideas. The Society of Physician Entrepreneurs was born. We just didn't know it at the time since it took us 3 more years to figure out our value proposition and validate the other hypotheses in our mission driven business model canvas.

April 25th is the anniversary of Jim Blakely's death. Physician entrepreneurs need to make it personal but not take it personally. Jim made it personal for me and his legacy will continue to do so.

There were many lessons learned in our journey. Here are some.

Here is why origin stories are important.

Tell your story. Make it personal. Test your business ideas. You never know if or how someone will use your product.

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