“My four-year-old is starting to understand work and I want her to know she can make a difference, that she can help people.”
– Stephanie Hon

While that passion can drive innovators to accomplish incredible things, battling friction in a complex system that is in a state of permanent flux – and working with stakeholders with potentially competing motivations – is a one-way ticket to exhaustion. Burnout among U.S. doctors and nurses is at an all-time high, with 63% reporting symptoms. Our research found many of our healthcare innovators were feeling the effects too.

Those who discovered a way forward did so by channeling their passion to break through the friction. They used their expertise to drive innovation throughout their organizations while keeping in mind that healthcare is still (in most places) a business.

How can innovators navigate the initial highs and lows of healthcare and start to gain traction?

Going in with an open heart is great, but open eyes are also crucial. The healthcare ecosystem is enormous, complex, and often initially inscrutable. The regulatory and financial models are unique. Take time to research and map the ecosystem and sub-sector that your company or organization will operate in, as well as the latest regulations. (For example, the US department of Health and Human Services is a good place to start – as are the Wiki pages about the move from “fee for service’’ to “value-based care”). We heard from quite a few innovators who skipped this step then found themselves surprised and frustrated once through the door.

Friction and complexity don’t just exist outside your company. They’re inside too. Each healthcare-focused organization is structured a bit differently and exists at different points along the innovation maturity curve.

Ask your hiring manager where your team sits. Understand the structure of the organization around you, make contacts, ask questions, listen, and learn. Determine who might be potential critical-path partners, collaborators, subject matter experts, gatekeepers, stakeholders, and clients. Learn what people and processes exist for identifying, prioritizing, funding, greenlighting, evolving, overseeing, and evaluating innovation work.

Try to assess where the organization might be along the innovation maturity curve. Is it just beginning to hire in human-centered design, engineering, and user experience expertise? Does it have established teams in inconsistent pockets throughout the company? Does it have centralized operations or is it in the middle of a major design re-organization?

For innovators who reported episodes of success, a sense of traction, and accomplishment, there was a common theme: Doing classic innovation work was just one part of the job. To be successful, they couldn’t just design solutions for end users – they also had to imagine, design, and develop various aspects of the internal innovation capability itself. (See also our Innovation 2.0 report: Insights from leaders on navigating a post-crisis world) Whether as a centralized team or an individual, these practitioners recognized the need to grow their own skills in order to directly address the complex challenges that lay along the path of getting innovation out the door.

While the mission of healthcare is to heal people, money still matters. In some countries, like the U.S., the industry is built on a market-based model where profits and losses drive decisions. In other countries with public health systems, funding and cost-cutting still steer the ship. Innovators told us that they benefitted from understanding the financial mechanics of modern healthcare. Regulations, profit margins, and other headwinds will impact business decision-making, priorities, and funding. Bound by complex financial models and a sacred oath to ‘do no harm,’ healthcare can be a risk-averse business. Don’t be afraid to ask: Who pays? Who is the client? What’s motivating my organization to innovate?

“If we can make a nurse more efficient that seems logically better, but if there isn’t a reimbursement benefit tied to that then change might not occur. Conversely, understanding reimbursement can propel the work. So that’s a piece of advice: know your story about reimbursements!”
– Rob Lister and Kara Harrington

Learn to find balance by pairing passion with pragmatism. Flip the cards to learn about actions you can take to address these common challenges.

What’s the value of design? It’s a particularly thorny question for risk-averse healthcare organizations who traditionally develop solutions off the back of rigorous scientific proof. While those on the business side of healthcare are schooled on clinical outcomes, return on investment (ROI) and measurable progress, innovators often work upstream wrestling with ambiguity and the unknown. Designers are trained to be attuned to qualitative experiences and emotions, looking beyond the delivery of healthcare into ways in which healthcare is presented and experienced by those who need it.

Leadership cycles are also different than innovation cycles. It can take 3-5 years or more to bring a medical device to the market, while some leaders rotate every 18 to 24 months. Other leaders are lifers, who’ve been around so long they feel they’ve already seen it all.

“It’s a business like any other at the end of the day, right? There is a CEO that reports to the board, there are investors, and they want to see that hockey stick growth on the chart.”
– Stephanie Hon

If you work for a firm with a solid design culture – great. If not, you might face major hurdles, like having the funding suddenly cut for a project that you’ve been working on for years. These disconnections between designers and business leaders can cause mayhem, with big-name healthcare firms restructuring or laying off large innovation teams when financial outlooks get rocky.

“The role of design within a corporate innovation model depends on getting the right people on the right project with the right budget.”
– Strategy Director

What steps can be taken to build mutual understanding between business leaders and designers?

In every interview with every healthcare innovator, the subject of leadership inevitably came up. The message was clear: To move innovation forward you must elicit support from the higher-ups.

“You’ve got to have the people with the power and the purse strings in your corner, especially in such a conservative industry.”
– Russell Flench, Design Operations Director

Leaders don’t always come from a design or innovation background. They may not really understand what we do or why it’s important. Designers still need to better articulate the value of strategic design to the C-suite. But make sure you retain the foundations of your human-centered qualitative approach, even if it makes some leaders nervous.

So how can an innovator up their communication around ROI? Either find a leader who already champions innovation or convert one into a champion. To do so, many of our interviewees advocate for working as closely to leaders as possible. Don’t be afraid to speak to the decision-makers you serve, or, if access is limited, speak to those who have greater familiarity with how your decision-makers work. And get good at storytelling. Why? Because leaders set organizational priorities, they approve and secure funding, they enable practitioners to make connections, and they open doors throughout the organization.

What happens if you’ve built up a great relationship with one business leader and then they move on? If you can’t beat ‘em (or stop ‘em from leaving) join ‘em. Look for opportunities to grow into a seat at the leadership table and advocate for innovations you believe in. Even though this can be a challenging mountain to climb, it might also provide the greatest long-term reward.

“I realized that as an individual technical contributor at the bottom of the food chain, I had to switch to the dark side, from engineer to manager while juggling back and forth between innovation contributor and leader, into an executive position.”
– R&D Leader

Mutual understanding goes a long way. And that starts with speaking each other’s language. Business leaders and their teams will benefit from learning the lexicon of designers just as much as designers will benefit from learning the stress points and decision-making factors that healthcare and technology leaders must balance.

“I try to show where commonalities exist. I think there is a lot of overlap between human-centered design and the scientific method. In the scientific method, you’re asked to make observations – that’s empathy. Then you make a hypothesis – that’s like reframing. The next step is experimentation – which is like prototyping… So, the language might be different, but the basic process is the same.”
– Christina Mainero

Leaders make informed decisions off the back of evidence and insights. Those with science or business backgrounds often find comfort in quantitative data. While many human-centered innovators have historically anchored themselves to the realm of the qualitative, practitioners continue to build muscle using quant for both validation and inspiration. One emerging area is data driven design, where teams create experimental digital or physical prototypes that generate further data to evolve the design. Helping organizations unlock the power of both quant and qual is a strength.

Don’t turn away from the power of a real human story. Stories are how people have made sense of the world since time immemorial.

“Every time I listen to a UX research call, it’s heartbreaking… There was just one; it was a husband who had a wife with severe PTSD from an accident. The work he had to do on her behalf to try to get her treatment, the story of that experience, that sticks.”
– Innovation Leader, Fortune 50 Healthcare Company

Newly-hired innovators coming into a healthcare organization may not be initially granted the mandate or scope of work required to get broad change done. Even innovators must build trust, and this can be extra challenging in risk-adverse organizations.

“Innovation, in healthcare especially, is systems based. It’s about creating systems that make things work well, quickly, and efficiently. The goal is to set up the black box and then not mess with it. Innovation and change by nature, however, needs to stir the pot.”
– CX Director, Biotech

In the short term, focus on the job at hand, the mandate you have been given, even if it’s imperfect. Let’s face it, it’s not uncommon to find innovation work underfunded, lacking definition, poorly scoped, thinly supported or short on time. But in the eyes of the organization, it still needs to get done.

Use initial mandates to learn, gain some quick wins, and build trust. Also use this time to feel out leadership and unearth how they scope and prioritize work. It’s sensible to remember many leaders may not actually come from an innovation background.

Once you’ve got the lay of the land you can begin to build a plan for the long term by identifying where you can have the greatest impact, building a case, and taking recommendations to leadership.

Learn to bridge silos by (re) connecting design with science & business. Flip the cards to learn about actions you can take to address these common challenges.

Much of what is written about innovation management focuses on the long game and big picture of massive company re-orgs. But the reality for most of the innovators we spoke to is that they work for organizations that are constantly changing, and for all sorts of reasons.

For some, these inevitable upheavals in reporting structures, leadership, and priorities stymied their ability to deliver innovation. Others have learned to move innovation forward regardless of the structure emerging around them.

How can healthcare innovators keep things moving in the face of inevitable complexity and change?

No matter how big or broad the innovation capabilities of your team may be, you can never do it all. Make sure you consider the full spectrum of how you may be able to enlist help. For those in organizations where the innovation team is nascent at best, consider other ways to gain more advocates and allies. The more options you consider upfront, the more nimble you may be as resources and needs change.

In more mature organizations where established pockets of innovation exist, consider experiments where you can band together and work on a broader problem space.

Healthcare organizations can be huge, complex, and particularly difficult to navigate for new hires. It can take years for an individual to build up their own personal network of essential contacts. To gain momentum, make time for those who have been in the organization the longest and can show you the ropes. These creative connectors can get you quickly networked in to key stakeholders, gatekeepers, and subject matter experts across the ecosystem.

“Team up with some folks who have been at it for a long time and stay close to them so you can really understand it all… I was fortunate to have a manager who held sway with doctors and knew how things would get traction. He connected me to those people on day one… Someone like that can clear a path for you. And those relationships have been huge for me.”
– Russell Flench, Design Operations Director

It’s human nature to want to nurture a potential solution and package it into the best possible presentation before sharing it with stakeholders across the broader organization. But healthcare innovators have learned the hard way that ‘black box’ or ‘overly polished’ work can leave broader stakeholder groups feeling they have been denied the opportunity to collaborate and shape the work. Consider inviting potential naysayers in early, give everyone a chance to be heard and feel understood. Building a culture of mutual understanding, trust, and respect, helps teams pick up momentum in the long run.

It’s tempting – particularly in an organization just starting its journey along the innovation maturity curve – to try to proselytize the benefits of a particular school of thought. Innovation systems such as ‘design thinking,’ ‘agile’ or ‘scrum’ may be good guidelines but beware of buzzwords or over-prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions. When building your project approach, it’s often more helpful to keep the methods simple and familiar to the organization.

Many of our practitioners talked about gaining traction by spotting opportunities where they could help solve someone else’s problem through the specific tool they already had up their sleeve. Consider how you can demonstrate your expertise and tools of the trade in a way that helps out others around you.

“Concepts and frameworks induce critical thinking while processes and templates nourish compliant execution.”
– Milan Ivosevic

One of the most vital roles innovators can play when moving development programs through the pipeline is to constantly ensure that the ‘problem to be addressed’ by the emerging solution is clearly defined and understood. Are we focused on the right needs? Does the emerging solution have a clear purpose? Does the emerging solution provide a clear benefit?

“It’s like that story from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the computer spits out the answer to life, the universe and everything, and after like a gazillion years of computations, the answer comes out as 42. If we spent more time on thinking about the question, being clear about what we’re really solving for, we would be far more successful.”
– Jamie Yoxen, Commercial Leader

Help your organization practice discernment – innovation is an investment of time, money, people, effort. Not all initiatives make it to market, nor should they. From a business perspective, sometimes helping organizations move away from bad project scopes and investments is a win in and of itself.

The fundamental role of innovation is to identify problems to solve, and then solve them. Innovators can forget that many coworkers and collaborators can be uncomfortable talking about the challenges they face, especially in front of leadership. Real fear exists that leadership will view these problems as failures, or that focus will shift to assigning blame. At the same time, the longer an innovation issue goes unaddressed, the more time, money, and effort may be required to address it later in the development cycle.

Discuss ground rules with leaders, stakeholders and collaborators to encourage the surfacing of potential developmental challenges and a proactive, collaborative spirit towards problem solving.

Healthcare innovation often involves navigating vast and complex ecosystems; it can sometimes feel overwhelmingly impossible to get anything done. Start small by focusing on achievable problems to solve. Document and celebrate examples of your own impact. Trust that good work will build on itself over time.

“People say ‘but we’ve always done that this way.’ My proudest moments, I would say, are the few times I managed to shake up conventional thinking in some conversation, when people start to question their assumptions, because basically that’s what innovation is about: people and mindsets, you cannot do everything alone. You have to be patient. You have to celebrate the successful moments.”
– Innovation Leader, Pharma

Learn about new ways to move forward through action, even in the face of uncertainty. Flip the cards to learn about actions you can take to address these common challenges.

Innovation can be challenging, full of unexpected surprises and roadblocks. The stories we heard from the 21 healthcare practitioners we spoke with highlight the many ways innovators can navigate the innovation journey. These challenges are not specific to just healthcare, they are applicable to any industry.