For 10 years or so, early-career entrepreneurs have come together at events like startup camps and small-business incubator meetings to try to get a venture off the ground.
But Tom Higley — who has started six companies and worked as CEO of two others over the past 20 years — muses that no efforts have been made to bring together proven entrepreneurs to find market-based solutions to societal problems.
As of Tuesday, however, Higley is taking on that effort himself.
Tuesday afternoon at Denver’s McNichols Civic Center Building, he will launch the 10.10.10 project — a program that will bring together 10 successful business launchers to meet for the next 10 days to discuss ways to tackle 10 of the most “wicked” problems dogging health care.
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On Feb. 26, after being cloistered with each other and with “validators” from nonprofit and business groups who pitch to them the barriers they’ve encountered in trying to go after the same problems, the business leaders will explain at a public event what they have learned and whether they will attempt to launch a company to take on any of the problems.
Higley said there’s never been anything quite like 10.10.10, with its compressed time frame, intensive focus and emphasis on marketable solutions rather than society-wide approaches that could leave big-picture solutions without direction or funding.
He expects at least two or three of the entrepreneurs will launch companies in the coming months because of the discussions they have in the next week-and-a-half.
“It’s a key feature of the program that the prospective CEOs learn by working with each other,” Higley said. “I actually expect that every one of them will come away with the notion that they’re glad they did this.”
The validators range from think-tank-like groups like the Colorado Health Foundation to business such as Xerox and Kaiser Permanente.
Kelly Dunkin, vice president of philanthropy at the health foundation, said her group is particularly interested in how to make Colorado the healthiest state in the nation, and it’s been working on issues from childhood obesity to disparity in minority health for years. Officials have been frustrated with established health care leaders’ inability to find successful ways to increase kids’ activity levels or to change the environment to promote healthier eating. She is interested to see if the gathered entrepreneurs can come up with a solution others haven’t.
Heather Haugen, CEO of Xerox’s Breakaway Group, is more interested in how health-care companies can make patients become more involved in their own health care. She thinks the 10-day discussion with new voices might unlock an idea that hasn’t surfaced yet.
“The truth is, especially in health care, we get a little too insulated,” Haugen said. “This can be disruptive.”
Higley added that he hopes to conduct similar meetings at least three times a year this year and next year in cities across the U.S. By 2017, he also hopes he can expand the program to other problem topics, such as energy, food or education.
Date: February 15, 2015