Why physician entrepreneurship?

Life science entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) with the goal of creating customer/user-defined value through the deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation using a VAST business model designed to achieve some part of the sextuple aim. Innovation can come in many forms, not just products and services . There are many new exciting business opportunities for innovators to develop and commercialize their new ideas.

But, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes (the guy in the picture above), the process can be nasty, brutish and, in most instances, short. So why would someone do it?

Fundamentally, doctors pursue entrepreneurial side gigs or jobs because they want to or they have to.

The drivers of physician international entrepreneurship include:

1. Fear: Doctors are afraid they will suffer the professional, personal and economic consequences if they don't adapt to change
2. Greed: Innovation and new business models threaten physician incomes
3. Necessity: Most doctors in industrialized countries have a high standard of living. They did not bother themselves with innovation or entrepreneurship because they didn't have to.
4. The innovation imperative: The pace of change has accelerated, and markets and employers are demanding more with less

5. Generational demands: Medical students and residents are questioning their career decisions and demanding that schools provide them with the innovation and entrepreneurship education and training knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to thrive after graduation and throughout their careers

6. The shifting doctor-patient relationship: Technology and DIY medicine is disintermediating doctors and fundamentally altering the doctor-patient relationship

7. Resources: The internet, local ecosystems, accelerators and access to early stage capital?has made it easier to start a business or develop an idea. People are connecting to the global economy.???

8. Portfolio careers: The sick care gig economy is growing and the future of work is changing. Fewer are committing to one lifetime career or job, including clinical medicine

9. Opportunities: With change, comes opportunities and those few doctors with an entrepreneurial mindset?are actively pursuing them.The opportunities in health entrepreneurship are sizable?and physician entrepreneurs are increasing well positioned to capitalize on them.????

10. Culture: The culture of medicine is changing and encouraging creativity and innovation?

11. Politics: Access to quality care at an affordable price is in high demand as middle classes grow in developing countries. Not providing it leads to social upheaval and political instability.

12. Budget deficits: The demand for care is almost infinite. However, the supply is limited. Consequently, policy makers and markets are looking for ways to improve outcomes at a lower cost through the deployment of innovation.

13. Youth unemployment: Restless unemployed, educated citizens are demanding jobs and ways to use their talents.

14. Economic development: Innovation and entrepreneurship is fuel that that feeds the engines of economic development in emerging economies. like Africa.

15. Globalization: People, money and technology go where they are treated best, regardless of location.

16. Psychology: Entrepreneurs are intrinsically motivated, driven, or some cases, obsessed with treating internal pain, be it family, a technical issue, psychological, emotional or social. It does the job they want it to do and is a socially acceptable analgesic and anodyne.

17. Life events, like disability, divorce, disasters, disqualification from practicing because they are international graduates, or disciplinary actions that restrict their medical practice license.

18. Projected workforce shortages : We need innovative ways to do more with fewer people to do it.

But most do it because they make it personal but don't take it personally. As such, physician entrepreneurs want to:

1. Create mastery, autonomy, and purpose in their lives
2. Overcome the barriers to global health outcomes
3. Satisfy personal psychic needs
4. Improve the dismal failure rates of new products
5. Make money
6. Meet the almost infinite international demand for care with finite resources
7. Eliminate waste
8. Save the planet
9. Exercise their entrepreneurial psychopathologies in socially acceptable ways
10. Protect their families
11. Help patients other than seeing them face to face
12. They are burned out and tired of clinical medicine or they can no longer see patients because of disability, some disciplinary action or their inability to practice because of licensure prohibitions.
13. They want to find their ikigai
14. They want to be happy
15. They want to get back in touch with their true self
16. Save their private practice as medical practice entrepreneur
17. Create value for their employer as an intrapreneur
18. Make money as a physician investor
19. Create new educational programs and technologies
20. Get promoted and tenure as an academic entrepreneur

There are many ways to innovate in addition to creating a good or service.

Every doctor should have (at least) a second career , if, for no other reason than, it will make you a better doctor .

Healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship is growing around the world. Like all choices, most are choosing to do it emotionally and justifying their decision rationally because they want to, or they have to.

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