Sometimes I laugh at some of the truly crazy ideas I come up with. This week I went to a meeting at 660 Ackerman to talk to an inventor around some algorithms in management engineering, cool stuff, brilliant guy, great team and super engaged department. It was a fun meeting, the energy was excellent, we gotta a plan, a mission, we’re gonna try- because if we don’t try, we got nada.
BUT in the elevator going down, leaving the building i couldn’t help but stare at the directory in the elevator- every floor, various departments, all around the management services, departments etc for the hospital/cancer center etc. Sometimes intellectual property is not obvious- transfer offices are hard wired to find IP and patents in the labs and benches of our core R&D offerings on campus, but here, in this building I see a different kind of IP.
The IP of process, the IP of expense, the IP of transactions, patient experience, revenue cycle management, billing, customer management, data analytics, workflow optimization, strategy on how to save millions and spend it wisely…. this building is full of IP, it holds 2 startups maybe more we just haven’t found them yet.
But they’re here, I know it. Even better they’re all likely to be enabled through software, which is CHEAP considering its power in wielding the ability to manifest NEXT.
I studied that floor department listing more closely, yeah… i nodded and the elevator doors opened, people were getting in and I was there just staring that this directory… eventually I had to get out of the elevator.
Hackathon, yep, you heard me, hackaton, this whole building needs to do one massive floor by floor challenge hackathon, each floor is responsible for serving up big ideas they see, big opportunities they believe could be huge, and the whys behind that, and the notions of how’d they do it, each floor of 660 ackerman, needs to battle it out with the other floors, together creating one massive say, day long or week long hackathon- they dont need to code, merely serve up the big idea, they compete with the other floors, we do our own shark tank, have teams manifest their pitches, I’ll help each one of them do it, me and my team, you got it, then lets see, bring forth the ideas i know that are in that building. Make it fun, make it engaging, enable the guy or gal that has seen the same problem over and over and over, step out of the cubical and say “ummm i got an idea to fix this” because the beauty of that idea is that FIRST, we, Ohio State benefits from that innovation, and then second, we take it to market, and third, we change the culture and we enable people to show us the next, and they want to be heard.
Now how to pull this off?
Well thats like a proposal, then a conversation, then a meeting, and so on. Would everyone participate, maybe yes, likely no, but without trying you get nothing, I’ll keep trying. Plus it’d be a hugely awesome feat if we could do it… really WE can, just gotta say, do lets go for it.
Nothing motivates people like annoying problems, or well cash, but while a cash prize could be done, we really want the annoying problems and the experts to fix them to stand up.
Easily over half of commercialization is “noticing” what could be, and then being crazy enough to go for it.
I notice you 660 Ackerman, I will keep digging!