Entrepreneurial Thinking, Team Building, and Healthcare Start-­ups

Creating a start-up is a team effort. Healthcare professionals, in the leading role, contribute many of their attributes to the team, but they also should be conscious of their limitations. Healthcare professionals have not traditionally received specific training in the business world and therefore lack much of the knowledge necessary to carry out the idea successfully.

Entrepreneurs creating a start-up company to bring a new idea to the market should surround themselves with capable people who complement their shortcomings and help them to carry out their vision. Teams are essential in the health sector because:

• The accelerated rhythm of progress that shakes the health sector requires entrepreneurs to develop teams whose members have diverse talents in order to move forward and grow at the required speed in an effective and efficient way. No single person, including the entrepreneur, has all the answers for the challenges the entire team will face during the initial start-up.

• The convergence of diverse bordering sectors, for example health and technology or health and engineering, makes it necessary to have experts in each field who are capable of productively exploring the opportunities that exist on the frontiers of each discipline.

• Healthcare innovation, both incremental (little improvements) and disruptive (advances that transform the sector), has enormous potential in the presence of different styles and manner of thinking.

The most important asset of any company or idea is the people behind it. Ideas are worth nothing; it is the execution of these ideas that makes them valuable. People bring the ideas to life. The team is the difference between success and failure.

The entrepreneur who is building a team should be able to provide that team with the responsibility and authority to carry out specific instructions within the company. Health entrepreneurs sometimes inadvertently stop the team from working effectively because they “micromanage” their people and maintain strict control over what each member of the team does.

Micromanaging may seem like a natural tendency, but it is impossible for the entrepreneur to maintain that level of control in that the creative contribution of collaborators will be limited and will generate little enthusiasm for the work.

Healthcare entrepreneurs can “macromanage” the project by defining fundamental lines and allowing the collaborators to work freely in their own areas. For the company to grow and move forward from the initial start-up phase, healthcare professionals should share their vision for the future with the rest of the team and allow them to carry it out.

To build a good team, the health entrepreneur must find, motivate, convince, and retain people who contribute value to the initiative:

• Find: The healthcare professional should learn networking skills to cultivate a system for obtaining information, advice, and support. Good entrepreneurs continually look to increase their network to improve the possibility of making their idea a success. They actively promote their visibility, frequently participating in entrepreneur forums, medical conferences, investor symposiums, and so on. Not only are they capable of attracting talent to the project, but they are also capable of quickly building personal relationships.

• Motivate: Healthcare entrepreneurs must communicate their ideas effectively to affect and influence those around them. Getting the support of others for our ideas is essential to the entrepreneurial process. This requires learning to present the idea, to send the right messages using language appropriate for the audience. It is important that everyone can “visualize” the company, even in its earliest phases. Similarly, the entrepreneur should be ready to translate the medical terminology into business language — costs, investment return, benefits — the language that the sector is familiar with.

• Convince: The genuine and authentic entrepreneur is able to convey honesty to convince the right people to join the project.

• Retain: Entrepreneurs understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team and work tirelessly to soften the existing barriers between members, so they understand and share their circumstances, motivations, and frustrations.

Entrepreneurs must lead the team, investing time and effort through constant dialogue, demonstrating their own abilities, and learning from others.

Adapted from Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Sector: From Idea to Funding to Launch by Luis Pareras, MD, PhD, MBA