Okay, so, first of all how many of you would say that you’re innovators? You do things that are new and they’re useful and you create value in your clinics by being innovative.
That is one of the most priceless gifts that you can have, is innovation.
Today your challenge and what we’re going to go through in this article, is how you can become more innovative and why it’s so important.
Asking Cade, Regan says, “if you think of the innovators of the world, who are some people that come to your mind?”
Cade states, “Well, I think the most obvious one would probably be Elon Musk.”
There’s so many, but when looking at Thomas Edison, he was an innovator, because he actually brought things to the marketplace. Nikola Tesla was an inventor and a lot of what he did is now coming to the marketplace hundreds of years later
The Innovators of Our Time
If you look at history some of the biggest advancements came because there’s innovators out there, and so one of the beautiful things about the Go Wellness Community, is we are full of innovators.
Today we’re going to talk about why innovation is so important and so, by the end of this hopefully i’ve given you guys some insights on what innovation is and then you will be able to creatively brainstorm some ways that you can bring better innovation into your practice.
Some people mistakenly think that anything that’s new is innovation. Bringing new things in can be helpful, but as you’ll see when we define innovation, innovation is actually the other side of that.
It’s got to be novel, but it also has to be something that’s useful.
So I think a lot of us are great at bringing new things in and that vendor sells us on the latest product or service. But, but really what we’re going to be identifying, whittling down is what are some of the innovations you can bring into your practice?
Bringing Innovations Into Your Practice
We get so busy, and so wrapped up in everything that we forget to take a step back and actually start looking at all the innovations. There’re so many easier ways of doing things, some of your stuff like 30 years in the past.
There’s this whole future that’s waiting for you, that is easier it’s faster it’s better it’s cheaper.
It will make your life, it will enhance it. So, let’s talk about some innovation.
So in the book Zero to One, if you guys have read this I would encourage you to read it again before session one kicks off.
This is just one of my favorite books, I believe, it was 2012/2013 when it came out, and Peter worked directly with Elon Musk in founding PayPal. Peter Thiel is just a very powerful thinker in Silicon Valley.
Some of the questions that he asked when it comes to innovation, what valuable healthcare business is nobody building?
So what’s nobody doing right now that you would love to do?
That’s an area that we look at and one of the things with Go Wellness, is nobody is putting in functional medicine in traditional Chinese medicine like this.
This model that we have, our 345 method, nobody’s doing this. So we’re building a brand new model, that’s our innovation.
Question number two for you, what are the major service centers that I can start innovating right now?
If you look in your practice now, what are some of the major service centers that you could actually innovate and start improving upon?
Maybe that’s adding in peptides, that’s a big innovation that we’ve had in the last year. Maybe it’s bringing on some of the new testing. Maybe putting a lab in your practice, or maybe it’s just as simple as learning how to use ultrasound.
There’s so many things that you can start innovating right now, if you just start looking.
Peter Teal says this has got to be something important and unknown. Something hard to do, but doable.
So even if you think of innovation as a faster bypass in a business system, or operations, that’s an innovation. Those innovations are more powerful than bringing in that new shiny device.
It’s just the way you communicate about something. All of the sudden it makes sense to people and they start to go for it. You get your whole team on board.
You have to choose something that’s hard to do, but also doable. Let’s get started, so here’s some innovative mindsets.
Giving us a great innovation mindset when it comes to a computer program, I love the phrase: I don’t know, but let’s find out together.
That could be your mantra for the next 90 days.
Innovation Defined
Plato said, “necessity is the mother of innovation”
On the Novell podcast, he kind of summarized by saying, “freedom is the child of innovation and prosperity is the parents.”
So innovation creates prosperity and some of the most prosperous, wealthy people on the planet are also innovators. Innovators aren’t confined to a boundary these days. They are all over.
If you think about the Renaissance, like Leonardo da Vinci, talk about an innovator there.
He had a lot of freedom at the time, and he was able to have some full expression. So make sure you’re always checking your innovation mindset.
I like this quote: business only has two functions: marketing and innovation.
I find that marketing is all about innovation. So basically your business has one function, which is innovation. So let’s talk about all the innovations that go on in the US economy.
Innovation in the Economy
According to the OECD research, 85% of all economic growth in the US between 1870 and 1950 is actually a result of innovation.
So, if you think about innovation and our productivity growth, the only way that the United States has become the leader in innovation is because that is our mindset. We believe in innovation, we let people fall hard, miserably. Then people stand up and they learn from that.
I think it was Thomas Edison, he said “I haven’t failed 10,000 times. I’ve just learned 10,000 things that don’t work”.
So innovation is what’s grown the United States. In some areas like Silicon Valley, that was a great area for innovation. But now those innovators are moving out.
Where Innovations Are
If you think of innovations, they always thrive in areas where there’s more freedom. So the more freedom there, if you think about the Internet, a whole industry was spawned.
That didn’t exist yet, like Facebook did not exist until Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah, there was MySpace and a couple other things like it, but where there was freedom in this arena, there was not a lot of government oversight. The government was like, we don’t know what to do with the Internet.
Then it wasn’t until 2017 that they said, here’s the hard line. Here’s what you can claim, here’s what you can’t claim and ever since then, they’ve been imposing more restrictions.
Our job is to innovate as quickly as we can. There’s always something new that’s out there, but, unfortunately the countries that have the most freedom and the times that those countries had the most freedom is where the most innovation came from.
It’s pretty exciting to think of Martin Luther King and also one of the biggest innovations which happened about about 1200 years ago, when the Gutenberg printing press was created.
Martin Luther was kind of just talking about innovation, when you break away from the thinking of single dogmatic religion, and you can break away from that and then that led to people coming to America in pursuit of bigger opportunities bigger, bigger capabilities of innovating. We’re going to see more and more of that.
Innovations in the Future
The innovations in the future will be in the cloud, because you know we can communicate, all of us are innovating right now just by talking about it.
Peter Teal says, be the first to the market, or maybe actually second is a better place to be. Mark Zuckerberg, for example. With MySpace and then Facebook was the thing that really took off, but he says there’s two things about companies:
All happy companies are different. Each one earns a monopoly by solving unique problems.
So are you monopolizing your marketplace with what you do?
Can anyone compete against you?
Innovating with Go Wellness
Innovation is taking two things that exist and putting them together in a brand new way.
This is where I wanted to end the conversation today because I think we have so many things that we have yet to put together. When I first called my clinic East West, I said I want to bring Eastern medicine and put it together with Western medicine.
I’ve maybe scratched the surface. 10% of that integration happens with very little amounts and I’m going to do more and more of that, that’s is my goal.
This is where we’ve got a huge opportunity to innovate and how can we innovate better? By working together and collaborating.
Like Peter Teal said, sales are the most important thing, and an innovation: you’ve got to be able to sell yourself on it. Sell your team on it and sell patients on it.
For more on innovating healthcare and to join in our discussions, sign up for our PAC on Go Wellness!