The market are the people/businesses who will give you money for your product.
Obvious right?
Except it’s not and it is easily overlooked by many.
Say you’ve made a new artificial knee which you believe is different or better in some way to the existing artificial knees currently used. Who would you sell this to? The doctor? The hospital? The FDA (or other public health organisation)? Is it the local commissioning group? How about the private hospitals? The general manager? The procurement team at the national level?
The answer is that it’s all of the above (and in healthcare to many more people).
This is one of the many reasons why it’s so hard to get innovation/a new product to be introduced into the world of medicine. You have to have a real insight and understanding of how the complicated world of healthcare works to even get near success.
I’ve lived and breathed medicine for the last 11 years of my life. I’ve worked in the hospital, in the outpatient departments, with the community teams, in more departments and hospitals than I care to recollect. It really hit me today how much this experience has helped me stay super focused on the goal. If I didn’t have my insights of the NHS I’d probably still be stuck with just having an idea instead of having actually created something.
A famous book by Malcolm Gladwell talks about how 10,000 hours is how much work you need to put in to achieve mastery in the field you have dedicated yourself to. When you’ve put in that amount of work you naturally start to have insights and thoughts that others simply aren’t capable of having yet.
I wrote a blog post a while ago about how most successful entrepreneurs, contrary to popular belief, are actually people who have gone to University and worked in a corporation. The reason is because they have put in those 10,000 hours, gotten a real understanding at a deep level of their industry and then used these insights to create a business.
The news likes to talk about the entrepreneurs who started something in their dorm room and then a year later became a millionaire. They’re in the news as it’s unusual and remarkable. But it’s not how most people who are successful, become successful.
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