How can you align your healthcare team around a common vision for innovation?

Before even defining your vision - one need to know your people first! you need to understand how your vision will come into your employees, if you want avoid natural resistance. Mostly people are a bit scared to start using new techniques instead of previously learned and mastered ones 🙂 Comunication is the key!

Clearly articulate the vision for innovation while sharing understanding about strategic alignment. Champion early adopters. Recognize and reward innovation. Get buy-in from leadership. Involve all stakeholders. Be patient and persistent.

Oftentimes many team members are intimidated by how innovation will impact their value, and ultimately their role in the company. Vision drivers should stive to communicate how these changes will enhance and strengthen the team from the onset. Once fear has been eliminated, drivers of innovation have already won half the battle!

Aligning your team around a common vision for innovation is an ongoing process that requires commitment, communication, and a culture of continuous improvement. It's an investment in the future success of your organization.

In order to engage your team effectively, you must have regular, open and inclusive communication by creating platforms where ideas and feedback can be exchanged. One must also lead by example by demonstrating one’s commitment to innovation to your own actions. Leaders should model their behavior on what they expect from the team.

If the first step of defining your vision included your team in some way, then your team will already be engaged. Their opinions, suggestions, and feedback is crucial throughout all these steps.

Embedding regulatory frameworks into your process design from the start. This establishes a clear pathway for compliance, essential for the success of biotech innovation. Harness AI to streamline operations, enhancing efficiency and enabling your team to focus on creative solutions instead of routine tasks. Simultaneously, foster a strong brand identity that champions innovation. A compelling brand story can unite your team under a shared purpose and communicate your commitment to innovation externally, attracting support from stakeholders and the market. This triad of regulatory foresight, operational efficiency, and brand strength creates a cohesive environment for innovation to thrive and for your team to align under a unified vision.

Most challenging in this perspective is the balance between breaking down silos within your organization and opening up to the outside world. It's a zero sum game: every resource needed to achieve an innovative culture and progress can only be used once. Being too internally focused reduces refreshing influence from outside, being to outwardly focused leads to dilution from your internal goals. Only experience will lead to the perfect balance.

A tarefa mais difícil é a comunicação entre saberes diferentes com linguagens e lógicas diferentes. Precisamos de profissionais de saúde que tenham conhecimentos de outras áreas, ciência dos dados p.e., para conseguir fazer a ponte entre áreas de conhecimento

With an inspirational vision backed by resources, role modeling, and grassroots engagement, a leader or strategic partner can rally a healthcare team around the transformational power of innovation. *Create opportunities for shared innovation experiences through hackathons, design thinking exercises, and experimental projects. Learning and recovering together is powerful. *Continuously gather feedback from frontline team members to assess what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve efforts. *Recognize those who exemplify the innovation vision through rewards, shine opportunities, and incorporate innovation impact into reviews. *Budget appropriately for resources, education, staffing, and technology needed to activate the vision.

Im not a fan of the word failure in the context of innovation. There are always going to be bumps in the road and its definitely not linear. I think that as long as we have a vision of where we are going, what is the desired outcome and who will benefit, we can overcome any obstacle even if this means slightly changing direction when needed. Honesty, vulnerability & being authentic are key when communicating with team members.

In short, you never learn from winning. Losing is a great teacher but only if you create a mindset in your team that today’s failure will be tomorrow’s success. That approach promotes creativity and stifles fear instead of the opposite, which was so much a part of the educational process of becoming a doctor! When failure occurs, create a designated forum to revisit that failure and create a better process moving forward!

Regulatory foresight Start by embedding regulatory considerations into the innovation process from the start. This ensures compliance and reduces the risk of costly setbacks. Operational efficiency Utilize AI to optimize operations, from data analysis to automation of repetitive tasks, which can free up team members to focus on creative solutions. Patient centricity Encourage a patient-centered approach by integrating patient-led clinical insights into the development cycle. This grounds the team’s work in real-world needs that drive meaningful innovation. Regularly communicate this triad of principles to create a cohesive and dynamic environment where health innovation is structured, adaptable to change, and focused on patient needs.

In some ways this might be the most difficult for teams to continuously improve. Eventually cognitive overload and reduced resilience squash innovation. One key to continued improvement is reducing the noise and having clarity of measures of ongoing success. Ongoing success looks different than launch success and teams need to keep a seemingly moving target in focus.

Instill a mindset of continuous improvement within your healthcare team. Encourage regular reflection on processes and outcomes. Provide the necessary resources and support to implement changes that enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Effective leadership sets the tone, articulates a clear vision, and actively encourages staff to explore new ideas and approaches. Empowering staff by giving them the autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of innovation initiatives is equally vital. When employees feel valued, heard, and trusted, they are more motivated to actively participate in the innovation process.

To inspire, leaders need to first be servants of their team. One of my favorite quotes about leadership is, "if servanthood is beneath you, then leadership is beyond you."

As mentioned above, it's hard to inspire and empower people without knowing their unique strengths, communication styles, and potential areas for contribution so that you can be strategic in your efforts and optimize results.

Before you start inspiring or even think about innovation we have to think about inclusiveness of ideas within the team. If the team is not diverse and inclusive it might not work. Common interest within the team might be the spark you need ….Just like any other change Innovation has its roots in Change Management. You have to identify Early adopters in your team. As a leader it’s important to communicate your vision but also to listen. Not being afraid to fail will go a long way to inspire your team to take risks. Innovation and Risk are the two parts of the same coin. Fear of Failure and Change Management is the biggest impediment for a team to innovate which leads to inertia.

The first step to innovation is to create a roadmap with small bites. Your team cannot boil the ocean. Start with manageable goals.

Identify champions and create a wall of fame for example, using data from quality improvement, you may give top performance badges to keep the team motivated and encourage the ones that are not contributing enough to want to make it to the wall of fame