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Align Your Foresight With Venture Capital

Health care strategists interested in an early peek at where their industry may be heading should monitor trends in venture capital funding. Those start-up and early phase companies are the future of health care technology, pharma, informatics and treatment modalities.

Your skills at predicting which ideas will make it big don't have to be perfect. But train yourself to ask lots of scenario-type questions: What if this idea becomes mainstream? What is our organization doing - and relying upon - that might be replaced or made obsolete? What would be the impact on us if that happened? How do we mitigate that impact? Are there new skills and/or knowledge that we must gain to take advantage of the idea?

Get a team together and facilitate a discussion. Develop a range of scenarios and possible responses, not because you're trying to be precisely right, but because shared insights and understanding improve your response - no matter which scenario ultimately proves correct.



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