2016 J Term

Posted on January 4, 2016

The 2016 BME J-Term on Innovation and Design in Medicine is about to kick off.  It’s going to be fantastic two weeks, we have several amazing patients willing to share their stories.  The students are a very nice mix from SEAS (wish we could have a few from the College or McIntire).   Stay tuned for some blog entries from the students.

Cheers to new beginnings!

Why do projects fail or succeed and what is failure anyway?

Posted on February 3, 2015

Of course there are lots of reasons why projects fail, but if you boil down any project which seemed amazing but ultimately resulted in nothing, to its core there are almost always the same reasons.

First and foremost is lack of passion. If you don’t have your heart behind it, you will find that its easy to get discouraged. It takes many conversations, many frustrations, and many failures to get a project into a presentable state. If the project is self-guided you’re guaranteed to spend many days wondering what to do next, knowing you’re stuck without a clue as to why or where you’re stuck, and butting heads with teammates. Passion for the project means that when you fail at something your desire to succeed outweighs your ego so that you are able to see what you did wrong and then improve on it. Passion helps channel the disciple to wait out the period of misery to try again with a clear head and a better plan (100 times over over many many months or years).

Second, you have to care about the user and/or the team (if you’ve found great people with passion), not the actual idea or project. Why? Because chances are, the idea is crappy.  In my project from Advanced Design my teammates and I found a really great problem. Several doctors, papers, and forums told us that! We won a lot of money and prizes with our idea! However as we continued to interview more patients we realized that our device had a serious, unfixable flaw: for the patients who needed our device, there was almost no way our device idea would work while for the patients on whom it would work it wasn’t very useful. Switching projects was very rough for the team. Half of the members left, we had to start interviewing all over again, lots of headache for everyone. Now we are back in full swing. We also got to keep the grant money, the learning, the project management structure and the advisors as we developed the new project.

So what is success? Based on my experiences success comes right after total miserable failure. Its when, after feeling pained that you didn’t think ahead, spend enough time, and (insert verb which made you fail), you finally figure out what you need to do to not fail in the same way again and consequently have the discipline to follow through with your plan. This is why it’s so rare for people’s first or second projects to be any good. You have to first figure out all the things you will fail at and ways around the failure before your projects will be successful.

*Note: you might need to try different kinds of projects to find what you’re passionate about. However  if you’re never able to wait out the misery in your projects and you’ve already tried a few different one, the problem is your discipline and you need to work on it!

@DashaTyshlek

The Importance of Community, Collaboration, and Cross-Pollination

Posted on January 29, 2015

Last spring, I decided to start a Mastermind group in order to help me achieve my goals. The idea of the Mastermind group is first credited to Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich. As he described it, the Mastermind Principle is “the coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony.” When this is done, “no two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”

Though Hill coined the term Mastermind Principle, the concept has been around for much longer. Many successful people have been part of these Mastermind groups:

• Benjamin Franklin put together The Juntoclub for mutual improvement in 1727,
• R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis would never have gotten as far as they did if they had not met regularly about their writings in the Inklings at the University of Oxford in the 1940s
• Henry Ford and Thomas Edison met in the Vagabonds in the 1920s

The benefits of a Mastermind group include mutual support, discovering different perspectives, access to more resources and networks, and a sense of accountability. Forbes described the many benefits excellently in this article.

In my group, we started out as four recent college grads with widely varying interests, but we were all on the same starting line with our eyes on the goal of becoming better innovators and entrepreneurs. Together, we set short and long-term goals, and met weekly over dinner to inspire, share achievements, and problem-solve.

At the end of the summer, though our group disbanded formal meetings as we grew out of our initial stages, our destinies are still largely intertwined. We are constantly on the lookout for opportunities for the group.

One of the initiatives that came out of our Mastermind group was BioTrep, whose aim it is now to create a larger Mastermind community of biotech student projects that meet each other on a regular basis to inspire, share achievements, and problem-solve.

The UVA community is full of leaders, but it is still lacking in the venues and events for collisions necessary to hit a critical mass as an innovation hub (like Boston). You don’t have to wait for this to happen on a large scale; seek out those around you who are on a similar path, and convene regularly with a purpose in your own Mastermind group.

For more detailed guidelines and best practices in how to form your own group, please see the article on Napoleon Hill Foundation’s website.

@azorychta

Nurses as makers?

Posted on January 20, 2015 Updated on January 29, 2015

Julia Truelove, RN BSN, is a former RWJF intern, a graduate student in Public Health Nursing Leadership at the University of Virginia School of Nursing, and an Innovation Fellow with the Virginia Center for Health Innovation. 

@juliamtruelove

H@cking medicine?

Posted on January 9, 2015

So many opportunities to Hack Medicine!  A different flavor than the more traditional ‘hackathon,’ or ‘hack fest’ that originated in the computer sciences/data sciences fields.

Check out MedStart (http://tuftsmedstart.com), MIT’s H@cking Medicine (http://hackingmedicine.mit.edu), and the newly created Co.Create at MGH (http://www.cocreate.hctransformationlab.org)!

Through HUB and BME, we send students to these events on a regular basis!  Email me if you’re interested!

2015

Posted on January 6, 2015

It’s another New Year and with it comes some new Spring semester classes and students!  The team is working hard to develop a great website that offers practical information for course participants as well as something for those just interested in biomedical design at UVA.

Comments and questions are welcome!