Commercializing Medical Devices Panel at the Global Business Forum

Check out this video of our panel "Commercializing Medical Devices: A View from the Trenches" at the U Miami Global Business Forum last month. We put four of the most successful serial entrepreneurs out there together & got their thoughts on the current situation and future direction of this industry. It is must viewing for anyone interested in medical technology, or healthcare entrepreneurship in general. If you watch from the very beginning, you'll see yours truly introducing the panel!

Average American Political Logic

Two recent posts by Krugman have left me a little more negative about the future of our country than I was before, although I guess I'm not too surprised. In this post, he cites a Pew Research Center poll showing that, while Americans strongly support spending cuts and are against raising taxes, they are opposed to every single individual domestic spending cut. In a later post, he cites a study showing that over 40% of recipients of medicare, social security, and unemployment benefits believe that they have not ever used a government social program. These beliefs seem to contradict lessons we all teach our elementary school children - basic arithmetic and the fact that nothing of value can be had without some kind of cost. I wonder when we start to forget these things...

Bus Plan vs. Bus Model (continued)

Found this quote from Angel Mike Maples: "Business model shouldn’t be confused with “business plan.” A business plan is a static thing, a business model charts money flowing out to create a product and money flowing back in from that product." Fair enough - but this still seems to be setting up a very traditional definition of a bus plan as a straw man. We teach our students that a bus plan must be very flexible and always adapting. We have also stripped away a lot of the operational detail that was a core component of the bus plan 10 years ago. 

Moving On or Giving Up?

Great report out today on the real unemployment story from the Roosevelt Institute. Borrowing Figure 1:


This really shows graphically that the recent drop in unemployment is not due to new jobs. Rather, it has been caused by people giving up & leaving the workforce. Of course, this does not count people who are underemployed (i.e. recent college grads working as baristas because they can't find anything better). I've been making this point for the past year or so - the unemployment rate dramatically understates the impact of this recession. Read the full report here.

Business Plan vs. Business Model

Just got back from the USASBE conference, and kept hearing talk there about how Business Plans are "out," being taken over by Business Modeling. So I did what any good blogger does and ran the two terms through Google Ngram. Sure enough, as you can see no one talked much about either until around 1970, then use of the term "business plan" grew steadily until around 2002, when it leveled off. Meanwhile, Use of the term "Business Model" really took off around 1997 (perhaps not coincidentally, this is the year that Clayton Christensen published The Innovator's Dilemma, as Christensen has become a vocal advocate of business model innovation). Now the frequency of use for the two terms has converged. I've been poking around in the business modeling literature for the past few months, and I'm still not sure that the two terms have substantially different meanings, but I'm open to being convinced.