Friday I did some fun things. I spoke to an Honors Finance class from the University of Illinois. Here are the slides. Thanks to everyone that helped me with these. I sent it out to my network for comments.
The kids today are a lot smarter and worldly than I ever was.We had great Q+A and went into far greater detail than what is on the slides, but there were some key takeaways.
- You can’t beat the market. But, there are tools today that allow value creators to attract and keep customers, and use jujitsu to make return.
- Not embracing change will cause you to fall behind. Using Web 3.0 tools allows the sharing economy to work for you. It’s up to you to add insight and generate action.
- Big data is early, even in finance. Every single industry is ripe to be innovated.
I had a great phone call with some folks that want to engender innovation. We talked about ecosystems, and building them. In the evening, InsightPD and WLV hosted a tremendous reception featuring cutting edge medically focused startups.
The medical industry, from software to devices is ripe for innovation. Many tools from the finance industry are going to make their way into Healthcare. Many aspects of consumer social networks will also make their way into the health system. Existing players are silo’d, and are looking to defend turf. Except, the winner in medical will figure out how to harness the crowd.
Some companies are beginning to try and figure it out. There is going to be a lot of failure. Some because of regulation. Some because of sales cycles. Some because the company couldn’t execute.
The one that worries me is failure because of lack of funding.
As I travel around and speak with investors, and fund managers, everyone is running away from investing in healthcare. They are afraid of it. There are some hurdles: FDA; uncertainty over Obamacare; Medicaid/Medicare lack of pay; or slow pay; long product development cycles; the expense of failure in some aspects of healthcare therapeutics and because returns in healthcare focused funds were down over the last several cycles.
Contrarian investing, investing in the cloud, would guide you to invest where others aren’t. Currently, the shiny “new” object is social networks and apps. They aren’t going away, but it’s getting harder to be imaginative and establish a new mainstream one.
One of the funny things about healthcare is that usually there is no problem with product/market fit. That’s easy. It’s selling, and getting different parts of the payment system on board to cover things. Without that, no one wants it.
However, there are massive giants in the healthcare ecosystem. Harnessed the correct way, with the right target market, those giants could be forced to buy new innovation, or will topple if the innovation and crowd are highly disruptive.
So far, a lot of healthcare startups on the IT side are iterative. Soon, they will totally be disruptive and cause massive headaches to established players. It’s not if it will happen, but when.
The midwest is the place this could happen, and happen quickly. That’s one of the reasons last night’s event at InsightPD was so important.
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