What's Over the Horizon?

Help your over-the-horizon foresight by paying attention to trends in the venture capital and start-up communities. To get you thinking, check out the links down a ways in the right sidebar, under the "Emerging Companies" header.

Here for example, from OneMedPlace's Med Tech Sentinel blog, you can read about developments in treating drug-resistant TB, a huge benefit for the estimated one-third of the world's population already infected, and innovations in mitral valve repair, offering less-invasive treatment options for thousands.

Nascent ideas, both, but two more "what if's...?" for health care strategists to plug into their models and begin asking the right questions, like...

• How can we monitor these ideas and others like them?
• When could the idea reach maximum impact?
• What does the idea replace or substitute for?
• Are there partnership opportunities for early adopters?
  
• What might this mean for our brand, our physicians and our patients?
• Are there other ways to reap the ideas' maximum benefits?

Remember too, as a strategist, it's not important to produce "precisely right" answers, nor is it even possible to do so much of the time. It's more important that you facilitate the right organizational conversations - conversations that lead to shared foresight and a range of "...if this happens, we need to be prepared to do that..." scenarios.

Fun stuff!