Bootcamp Begins (Part 2)
I survived bootcamp! For anyone worried about where the ‘Bootcamp (Part 2)’ blog update was last week – fear not, I did make it to the end. I took the weekend to get my reflections down on paper so apologies for the slightly later post than planned.
The second half of bootcamp was just as excellent and hectic as the first! It all kicked off with the arrival of our research teams as Chilworth Manor. In my last post, I introduced you to the role of ‘entrepreneurial lead’ (that’s me!), but behind every entrepreneurial lead, there is a team of university researchers and experts contributing every step of the way. In this post, I’ll introduce my team, highlight key lessons I’ve learned about the importance of having the right people around you, and share some of the itinerary for my 12 weeks of travel.
Teamwork makes (or breaks) the dream work
Something I’ve learned over the past week, is that when starting a new venture, the team of people around you are just as important, if not more, than your big idea. Ensuring that you have a strong, versatile and dynamic team is vital, and very often investors and funders care more about a good team than a good technology. I’m lucky to be a part of an incredible team of data scientists, clinicians, and researchers from the University and UHBW (NHS Trust) who will be supporting and guiding me through the next 12 weeks. At bootcamp, I was joined by two members of this team, Tori Hammond and Chris McWilliams. Tori is our technology transfer specialist from the University, and Chris is our principal scientific officer. In future posts I’ll dive deeper into the details of these specific roles. But for now, know that over the next 12 weeks, we’ll work closely as a team, adapting and refining our market validation strategy and making adjustments as we uncover new insights and opportunities for our research.
The opportunity to work with a business adviser is another one of the many benefits of joining the ICURe Explore programme and I feel incredibly lucky to have Richard Wyatt-Haines onboard our team. Richard is the Founder and Chairman of HCI, a digital health company transforming healthcare in the UK and beyond. Richard’s insights, experience, and deep knowledge of the digital health industry have already proven invaluable in guiding and shaping my thinking around commercialising digital health research.
When I first met Richard, he asked each team member to reflect on their ‘why’. Why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve by commercialising this research? Defining your ‘why’ at the outset of any project is crucial. It serves as your guiding force, keeping you grounded when challenges arise or the market pulls you in unexpected directions. It’s quite a big question to answer –Why do we do what we do? What is the force that drives us all? Do you have an answer in your head? In our research team, we all have different philosophies, world-views and goals, different why’s, however as a team we have a shared goal and mission – to make a significant and positive impact on people’s lives, and the world, by developing innovative and practical digital technologies for healthcare. Maybe later on in this series I’ll share my own personal why and reflect on the reasons I began working in this field. But for now, let’s get back to Bootcamp!
ICURe Action Plan
Part of what makes the ICURe journey so unique is how it arms you with market validation skills, then sets you free to test and shape your own path. You have the freedom to select your own trade-shows, set up meetings with companies and individuals of interest and follow the market wherever it may lead you. Bootcamp ended with each research team working together to create the ICURe Action Plan. The action plan details everything from the markets you intend to target, to the key assumptions you have made about your research, and finally – your 3 month itinerary.
To get started, the ICURe facilitators helped us identify the assumptions behind our research and showed us how to test them through conversations. They encouraged us to ask the tough questions that would determine whether our research had commercial potential in the sector we envisioned. As a team, we approached this systematically by creating hypothesis statements like, “We believe that… To verify that, we will…”. For example, one of ours was: “We believe that delayed ICU discharges are a high-priority issue for both clinicians and hospital administrators. To verify this, we will interview 10 healthcare providers to rank discharge delays among other operational challenges and discuss current solutions.” These statements helped shape my action plan, clarifying who I needed to speak to and what questions I needed to ask. As a team, we then began identifying trade shows and companies worldwide where I could test our hypotheses to better understand the market and our potential fit within it. I am therefore excited to finish this blog by announcing the conferences and trade-shows I’ll be attending:
- Arab Health 2025 (Dubai)
- Intensive Care Innovation Forum (Milan)
- ViVE Digital Health (Nashville)
- HIMSS (Las Vegas)
- Disasters Expo USA (Miami)
Between these events I’ll be travelling around Europe and the US to meet with companies and industry professionals to discuss my research, explore collaboration opportunities and most importantly learn as much as possible. Now that Bootcamp is behind me, it’s time for one thing and one thing only… my first meaningful conversation! Stay tuned for my next update to hear all about it!
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next one!