Innovation

A word with magical significance—to create something new out of a collection of ideas.

Innovation is the life blood of all start-ups. In this context, there is nothing more fulfilling than creating something that solves a specific problem in the day-in-the-life of a customer (or an end user). Vocera has created not just a product, but an entire product category of wearable instant voice communication system. If you pause and think for a moment, there are very few companies that can claim that moniker. We have carved out a very healthy market and serviced it with a system, and a product category, that did not exist before.

To be a leader is hard; a copycat very easy--Apple’s iPhone versus Google’s Android Nexus-One, or Netflix versus Redbox, eBay versus uBid etc. Vocera has shown the hospitals a better way to solve their workflow problem with our unique value proposition. What we need today more than ever before, is more innovation, at a faster pace. We have opened the doors to all our competitors and exposed the workflow management problem in the healthcare space. Now everyone from Cisco, Avaya to Nuance is gunning for those markets and hoping to up-end us. One only had to be present on the HIMSS floor this year to know the extent to which copycats are out for this space.

So what is the recipe for Innovation, you might ask? I have been brewing this in my pot for a long time and here is my secret recipe:

Observation

There must be a backdrop of a problem or a set of problems that one is trying to solve. Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. One of the best ways to innovate is to suspend any prejudgment about a solution and to immerse oneself in observing the problem. Spend a day in the shoes of the life of your end user/customer or just observe them, as if recording a video, and make mental notes of what they do (or don’t do) and play back the scenarios of what might be possible if they had our solution.

Generally speaking, asking customers a direct question as to what problem(s) they face does not result in the same solution that one would have if one simply observed them going about their daily activities. The idea of focus groups which started in the consumer products space decades ago is quite dated now because customers tend to color their answers with their own bias about the solution. It is best to watch and observe them as they go about doing their day-to-day activities (the concept of a-day-in-the-life-of-a-customer) and then visualize them doing the same thing with your new gadget/solution etc. The outcome between those two exercises is usually quite different.

When Southwest Airline (SWA) wanted to improve their fleet’s turn-around time (time between the plane touching the runway to when the same bird takes off), they methodically observed, then analyzed, all the activities that had to happen during that time period. The solution they uncovered was not something that they would have reached had they not watched and analyzed. They decided to standardize their entire fleet on one single type of aircraft (Boeing 737s) instead of a collection of 5 different fleets. By observing their pilots in-situ they realized that most of the elapsed time was being spent because pilots and the crew had to switch to a different aircraft and to get reoriented to the new cockpit and the safety procedures for that class of jets. Since SWA standardized their fleet, it has bested all national carriers with the quickest turn-around time and is the only airlines since 1971 that has NOT had a losing quarter!

Reshaping the Box

When asked about how ‘The Incredible,’ was created, Oscar winning Pixar Director Brad Bird, who was an outsider and just hired at the company, said in an interview, “Give me the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” Some of the best ideas that Brad saw generated were by members of the team that were mal-content because they saw different ways of doing things but didn’t have opportunities to try their ideas out. Pixar had had 6 straight $150M+ blockbusters prior to ‘The Incredibles’ and arguably, had figured out the secret sauce. Yet, Brad was brought in by Steve Jobs to shake things up because he was paranoid that complacency might set in.

Google harnesses a similar restlessness within their engineers by allowing them to devote a percentage of their time to pursuing ideas that are of no immediate import to the projects they are on. Further, the notion of quick prototyping-and-testing is very prevalent within the Googleplex. The idea being, that especially when it comes to software, it is better to prototype quickly and test the idea with the target base than to design it fully before launching it. A lot of their search engine algorithm improvements get beta tested, in-situ, on production servers with a high dose of diagnostic monitoring and if the feature/change does not bear expected results, it is simply turned off.

Serendipity

Mishaps are the mother of invention. We all know of the story behind Pepsi (which was accidentally created in search for a cure for dyspepsia), Splenda (originally intended to be an insecticide), or two of 3M’s most successful products, the Scotch-Tape and the Post-It Notes which were both serendipitously stumbled upon when the scientists were pursuing other research.

The main point here is that to stumble upon something interesting, one has to be trying ideas in pursuit of something and be in a state of alertness because we’re thinking about solving a problem. So when Spencer Silver, a 3M scientist in search of a super strong adhesive accidentally developed a super weak adhesive, his partner in crime, who was in the singing choir at St. Paul’s North Presbyterian Church and had been looking for easy bookmarks for his song book, immediately connected the dots and thought of creating what are now the Post-It Notes.

Serendipity doesn’t happen to those who are complacent, but has to be brought about by continuing to be restless.

Innovation at Vocera

Vocerans have all the ingredients--a dash of Observation, a measure of restlessness and a healthy dose of Serendipidity, together these have morphed into some unique new approaches to solving unique new problems faced by our customer base:

· Department based inner circle – an idea that was developed by observing the data patterns collected from many customer sites about calling trends.

· B1000A microphone box design - totally serendipitous. When we left the glue to cure overnight, instead of gluing the foam to the cavity, it glued the entire mic-box to the plastic assembly.

· Whistler ANR - leveraging the design control we have on our mechanical and hardware components to optimize the confluence of mechanical, hardware and firmware design.

· TCP Genie - a unique and unconventional twist to the conventional wisdom of only using UDP for audio streaming in VoIP because the TCP latency for Genie interaction was not noteworthy.

· Staff Assignment application created by Dave Shively visiting several hospitals and spending hours observing activities around a Nurse’s station.

There are many “malcontent” Vocerans who continue to work on ideas such as: using our badges to “automagically” generate WiFi coverage heat maps; CAFI to better understand Vocera health metric; VOS (voice metrics) to measure users voice experience; or the new Care Coordination application