No “Laurel Resting” Allowed!

An interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. Entitled “The Future of Medicine is in Your Smartphone”, Eric Topol – the author and a cardiologist – reviewed a lot of current and future developments in health innovation, most of which revolve around personal digital tools that interact with the cloud via your smartphone, collecting data from wearable devices, connecting you with apps and databanks that will, in the end, probably shift control of personal medical care from physicians and the healthcare “industry” to individuals. You can access the article online here.

One sentence that caught my eye as I read this story was “Someday, socks and shoes might analyze the human gait to, for instance, tell a Parkinson’s patient whether his or her medications are working or tell a caregiver whether an elderly family member is unsteady and at risk of falling.” It has probably only been less than 18 months since I read about a similar technology development, which I have since often incorporated in talks about healthcare innovation. In this earlier version, sensors are implanted in or under the carpeting in heavily travelled areas (e.g. the hallway between a bedroom and kitchen) of an older parent’s house, which would analyze the steps of the resident and provide feedback to their caregiving child, or even a professional caregiver. As I recall the earlier discussion, the premise is that foot-dragging due to weakness in the legs often precedes Transient Ischaemic Attack (TIA) or major strokes. The feedback from the carpet system might give everyone a valuable head start on detecting and treating the causes of stroke, and allow damage to be minimized!

Now, just a few months later, the concept has evolved from a system that would probably be quite expensive to install, certainly disruptive during the installation, and which provides a detection system that is confined to a very specific area of one’s home into a system that is theoretically less expensive, not at all disruptive (“here’s a new pair of slippers”) and would be active any time the individual has shoes or socks on, anyplace they go – at home or out. In short, the improvements would be manifold.

This single example is a reminder that, despite the innovative changes that are happening all around us, if someone has a good idea, someone else is probably already working on another idea that is one or two or more generations ahead of it.

I’ve seen this same thing happen with one of Innovaision’s major conceptual products – Avatar Assisted Therapy. Having received a lot of attention from publications including Popular Science magazine and awards like the Lockheed-Martin “Innovate the Future” prize, it would have been tempting to rest on our laurels. But what we have done instead is continue to evolve the concept, including the utilization of an entirely different game development platform within which to develop the hard tools used, and many changes and additions to the functionality of the technology and the areas of practice in which it can be utilized. In addition, we continue to create additional collaborations with others on both ends of the spectrum (technology and end users) which keeps the concept advancing.

The lesson for us all is that creative, innovative ideas, no matter how great they are, are only as good as their latest iteration – and there are always people working on the newest, greatest version of your good idea. This is reality, and it is as it should be. So, what’s an innovative company to do? Well first, don’t ever rest on your laurels. In addition, try some of these suggestions to keep you on the cutting edge:

Read and research. Keep track of what is going on right now in your industry, and what the most imaginative people in your field are talking about. Fortunately this becomes easier with online search tools (like Google Alerts). Curate the most valuable information you encounter. Also, read extensively outside of your field of endeavor. Some of the best advances have come from repurposing ideas from dissimilar areas.

Be a part of the conversation. Look for ways to collaborate with others. Seek out conversation pits like LinkedIn groups relevant to your work and become an active member of discussion groups, both online and elsewhere.

Listen to smart people. Whether they are colleagues or involved in completely unrelated projects, conversations with intelligent people are always a wise investment. Take a genius to lunch!

Tell your story. Tell it as often as possible, to anyone who will listen. The more you talk about your good ideas, the more you will see them evolve and improve. The questions and feedback you get from your listeners will be invaluable.

Pay attention to discontent. Within your organization or from your customer base, listen to complaints or concerns. People will tell you what isn’t working as well as it should and steer you to new good ideas.

More than ever, the adage “If you aren’t moving forward, you’re falling behind” is true. So work for success, celebrate your wins, and get up the next morning and head back out for more.

This is Dedicated…

There are a lot of “multi-tools” around that will help you keep your social media accounts in some kind of organized order, but I have be experimenting with a really basic approach that I’m finding to be greatly to my liking. The problems I have had in the past with the Swiss Army Knife approach that many of the mashup tools employ have been numerous. To begin with, they can be rather complicated, despite what the marketing might tell you. I like to think that I’m pretty savvy online, but some of these applications have led me down some baffling paths. Also, not all of the social media accounts work as well on any given platform as others, so although one tool might be perfect for tweeting and posting to Facebook, it might not work so well for LinkedIn or Pinterest. Then too, the tools may let you post to your SM accounts, but when you want to use other functions, you end up having to go to the native application after all. Also, when you try to put all of your eggs (or accounts) in one basket, you can wind up with a pretty cluttered screen! Finally, because of the different ways you can post information to your online channels, sometimes limitations associated with one platform are counterproductive on others. Twitters character limitation comes to mind, as it is more restrictive than most, so if I craft a message that I want to tweet, and I try to upload it to LinkedIn, for example, at the same time, I am probably not sending the best possible version of my message to LinkedIn, where I have more space to write my thoughts. This type of limitation might also occur with delayed posting options which can vary from platform to platform.

In search of another alternative that would suit me better, and give me the controls I wanted, I hit upon the idea of using a separate browser for my social media accounts, different from the one I use for my day-to-day surfing/research/business activities. My go-to browser is Google Chrome, but I won’t argue with you if you prefer to use Firefox or even (dare I say it) internet Explorer. There are a bunch of others as well, and perhaps one of those is atop your preference list. I encourage you to stick with it, but then pick your second choice for what follows. In my case the second choice is Opera (http://www.opera.com) a very highly ranked choice in the browser competitive space. So I am using Chrome for most of my day-to-day online actions, and Opera for my dedicated social media platform experience. Here’s what I did, try it and see if you like it as well.

Once I opened the Opera browser, I systematically pulled up my Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube accounts and made sure I was logged in to my main page for each. Theoretically you could add dozens more Social Media accounts, but we all have – or should have – our limits and mine is 7! Now here is the beautiful part, which uses a trick I have found not everyone knows about. When you right click a tab in most of the browsers, you get a mini navigation menu. The menu choices aren’t always exactly the same for every browser (for example, Chrome lets you “duplicate” a tab where Opera offers the option to “clone”) but one choice you will almost certainly see is “Pin Tab”. When you choose to pin a tab it will be moved to the far left of all the tabs on your browser, and will remain there while you go about any other browser-related business. You will probably notice right away that a pinned tab does not have the little “x” next to it, so you won’t accidently close it. However many tabs you pin will stay running in your browser window, regardless of what else you are doing online. Please note that when you are actually in an open window from one of your pinned tabs it still works like any other browser window you use. So, if I have my Twitter account front and center, and I then type www.nytimes.com in the address bar, I will be taken to the New York Times website and away from Twitter. Also, if you move off of your home page in any of the Social Media accounts for example, if you reply to a LinkedIn message) and then close your browser entirely, when you re-open it the pinned tab may be the page you left and not your home page. It’s always a good idea to go home!

For many browsers, this is all you need to do to set up your dedicated tabs and keep them at the ready. In the case of Opera, I did have to make one extra change which involved making sure that I had checked the “continue where I left off” radio button in the Settings>Browser>On Start Up section of the Opera controls. You should check your own browser documentation to see if this additional step, or something similar, needs to be activated.

Now when I want to get down to business with Social Media accounts, I just open up Opera, do whatever reading and/or posting I choose (using Copy and Paste when I want to post similar messages to various places). When I’m done, I close Opera and go back to Google Chrome for my other web-based activities. Not only do I feel more organized, I am pretty sure I’m reducing the amount of RAM I am using to run all of these tools once I close the browser, which pays off in performance overall – multitaskers should appreciate that.

So, if you are like me and have found the multi-platform social media tools unsatisfying, confusing, or less useful than you had hoped, you  might want to try this workaround and see if you don’t have better results. Let me know your experience!

LinkedIn Cleanup – Ending the Year Right

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn, you probably already know that. For me, it’s the most useful social platform I participate in, and in my social media pie, it’s most definitely the biggest slice. LinkedIn allows me to make useful business connections, learn from qualified experts, promote my brand, get recommendations from people who have worked with me (and share them publicly), participate in topic-focused groups (widening my connections even more!), post updates and even more extensive articles on subjects that interest me (aka “long form content”), find people who specialize in areas that are valuable to me, and so much more!

I have to admit though, that my LinkedIn behavior over the several years of my participation has been, well, kind of slutty. I have a bad tendency to accept nearly every request for connection that has come my way, and have joined the maximum number of groups, and the results are disturbing. I get way to many messages from way too many people I don’t know, and don’t know that I will ever need or want to know. Updates come fast and furious, and the list is filling up with announcements and news that aren’t always very useful.  And group membership…

I don’t think that 2,518 contacts of which many are random are going to really be as meaningful to me as, say 2,248 that are really relevant. So, the first thing I am going to do in my LinkedIn cleanup strategy is cut my connection list. If you don’t already know how to remove people from LinkedIn, it is really simple. Just click the menu item on your main page that is labeled “Connections” and for anyone on the list you wish to purge (there are no nice words for this, I considered “kill”, “deep six” and “eliminate” also, they all seem to indicate some form of illegal and deadly activity), look for “Remove Connection” (that’s nicer) under the “More” label. So simple. I removed three people just while typing this paragraph!

So, how am I going to decide who to keep and who to kill? One good start is to sort my contacts by the recency of conversation. If we haven’t connected in more than a year, chances are we don’t really have that much to say to one another, so if you are on the bottom end of my list, you are definitely at risk. The other filters I am going to use are also pretty basic. If the last four, or ten or all of your postings have been selling messages, you are gone. I don’t mind hearing a sales pitch now and then, we are in this for the business contacts after all, but try to follow the “1 out of 10 rule” with your sales pitches – give me some useful content in between. If I read your name and can’t figure out why I know you, look out! If your profession or job title doesn’t make sense to me, bye bye. And if I open your profile and find out that you only have 11 connections – one of which is obviously me, I’ll let you go as well. This latter criteria will help eliminate fake profiles that are just scammers – they do exist, as I documented recently, as well as people who aren’t really using LinkedIn in a meaningful way. Even if you are one of my best friends, why stay connected on this platform, since it will just result in a dead end for me? Friend, I can see YOU on Facebook.

I’m feeling better already, and now on to the next step. My groups. LinkedIn groups, as the platform instructions tell us “provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts”. And the good groups do just exactly that. But not all groups are created, or function, equally. As I mentioned I belong to the maximum number of groups, which is 50. I’ve joined these groups over time for one reason or another. Perhaps it was a request from a contact, or a suggestion by LinkedIn, or a group I found by searching for a specific subject. In any event, I notice a lot of traffic in some of the groups, with members suggesting topics regularly, much give and take on the discussion boards, in short they are active. Other groups seem to have sprung into existence only to lapse almost immediately into dormancy. For example, the most helpful groups have membership in the hundreds or even thousands, and there are often several topics under discussion at any time – sometimes as many as a couple dozen. Other groups have only a handful of members, which isn’t in and of itself a problem, but when you couple that with a deadly lack of activity, you do start to wonder, what is the point of hanging in there? So I am going to stick with Group A, which has 16,700 members and currently has 13 active discussion topics going, most of which were started in the past 3 days, and send Group B (32 members, Last posted topic was in September, average number of comments per discussion <1) to the woodshed. Just a cursory review suggests that my number of group memberships is going to be cut nearly in half! Oh, and that group that you started just so you could constantly bombard the members with sales information about your product – you’re out as well.

I can tell this clean-up is going to take some time. I don’t want to be overzealous and throw out the baby. But I am convinced that when I’m all done the time and attention I devote to LinkedIn will be even more valuable, and a lot less frustrating. Now I just have to keep repeating to myself my new mantra “Just because they asked you to connect, doesn’t mean you have to say yes!”

Your Scholarly Partners

One of the hallmarks of today’s information-heavy world has been the rise of “crowd sourced” information. The benefit of being able to access tons of information, posted by thousands (millions?) of contributors from all around the world represents a true sea change in the way we inform ourselves. Still, there are a lot of real pitfalls associated with crowd sourced information that cannot be overlooked. At the heart of this is accuracy. Web information is rarely validated by independent sources – Wikipedia does a pretty good job of fact-checking, but the many blogs and “expert sites” that you will be directed to when you enter a term in Google or another search engine are not. Often the information posted may be merely representative of one person’s opinion, or theory, or wishful thinking. It’s certainly not uncommon to find articles expressing completely opposite points of view on the same topic! For example, did you know that climate change is real, but that climate change is also a hoax?

While discovering this sort of prose might be helpful to the reader in suggesting trains of thought to consider, or providing hidden gems that actually can be tracked down and verified, it is unwise for anyone who wants to develop and expert, verified position on any topic to rely on much of the generic information that is readily available using the common tools most of us count on for discovering what we want to know online. Particularly if others are relying upon you as their expert, as a source of content, guidance or good advice, it is important that your position(s) are firmly grounded in verifiable data, information, and research.

Fortunately, there is hope! It’s called Google Scholar, and it just celebrated its tenth anniversary, although I am frequently surprised when people tell me they have never used it, or even heard of it!

Google Scholar could be looked at as a specialized version of the very familiar and ubiquitous Google search engine. The difference is that searches are done over a database of scholarly articles, and the results of a search will connect you with abstracts of articles from most of the peer-reviewed online journals around the world, as well as book excerpts, theses and court decisions. This is a massive database, estimated as covering 150 million documents or more. Using Google Scholar, you can not only find information on a topic of interest, but have that information delivered with a provided citation that will provide a higher level of confidence than a common search on a more general site like Google or Bing.

And there’s more. When you see your results you can also find lists of references that were used in the preparation of the document you are reading, and find out what other articles or entries have cited the current document, along with related articles that might be suggested by the tool. All of these features allow you to dig even deeper and find more reputable content on the topic of your desire.

The Google Scholar instructions include a variety of search tips that you might want to review to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit from this great tool. In particular these instructions address how you might get access to a full article, as the results you will see on Google Scholar are most often abstracts, brief synopses of a more detailed publication. Their instructions include clicking an attached “library link” or a link labeled [PDF] which may appear in your search results. If you have a subscription to a professional publication source, like Elsevier, or a library account at an institution of higher education, you may be able to gain access to full articles using those connections. Two additional ways I have found to get the entire source article include: simply searching for the full title of the article (put it in quotes) on the main Google search engine site, or finding an email address for any one of the authors (surprisingly easy to do in many cases!) and sending a polite request for an emailed copy of the article. I particularly like this second approach as it has resulted in connections and interesting discussions for me that have ranged far beyond the original request.

Another feature of Google Scholar that I particularly like is “Alerts”. When you initially search Google Scholar for a particular topic, you will see an envelope icon labeled “create alert” in the left sidebar. Click that icon and you will be walked through a simple process that will let you enter your email address and specify how many articles you would like to see at any time. Periodically (in my experience this is usually two, or sometimes three times a week) you will get an email that provides a brief description and link to the most recent articles that have been posted to Google Scholar, and match your search criteria. This is particularly valuable if you want to know the latest research on a topic of interest, or if you are positioning yourself as a content expert on a specific subject and want to be always up to date.

Google Scholar has long used the tagline “Stand on the shoulders of giants” to emphasize how this specialized search tool helps users to be not only informed, but informed in meaningful ways that resist impeachment. Whether you need good sources for a particular time and place and topic, or want to be known as someone who continually keeps up with important developments in your field, Google Scholar is most definitely worth your time!