Place: Johns Hopkins Medicine Technology Innovation Center, Baltimore

Program: One of my Technology Innovation Center roles (in addition to leading marketing, new business and design activities for new software projects) is the design, planning, and execution of an entrepreneurial accelerator program for early-stage Health IT ideas. The Entrepreneurial Pre-accelerator was created to help doctors, nurses, and other clinicians with ideas for solving problems through software.

Process: The program launches real products and start-up teams directly from the problem space. Clinicians who are accepted into the program are paired with business, technical, and design leads and go through the basics of business and technology design through the course of 16 weeks. I design the curriculum, on-board teams, recruit expert speakers and serve as the main program lead for start-up teams. I also shepherd teams through solving their identified clinical problem using design thinking techniques. Teams learn how to interview, observe, and empathize with end-users. They work to identify their business constraints. Then they use what they’ve found to storyboard, wireframe, and create their requirements document.

Product: The program began in 2015 with three teams (in 2016 the program grew to five teams). Of the three teams, two received translational funding awards and worked with the Technology Innovation Center to develop their minimum viable products. Both 2015 teams are working to grow their product and business further based on the programming. The 2016 teams have recently completed the program. They are currently working to gain translational funding and build their minimum viable products based on the design work they did in the program.