Will the First $1T Company be in Health?

Where will the first $1 trillion company come from? Some think it is already in the making, but not visible yet. The future is all around us and innovators can see it more than the rest of us.

As suggested, a convergence of technologies, including the Internet of Things, AI, robotics and synthetic biology, might just make a health company the first to be the Trillion Dollar Unicorn.

Most think that the key to innovation resides in some combination of people, processes, or culture. Others think it's a numbers game and those that innovate the most simply try the most. But, despite the early indications that stodgy healthcare organizations are treating their sclerosis, many more things need to happen.

1. Medicine and the medical establishment needs to recruit for innovation and support those with an entrepreneurial mindset. Now, those kinds of folks succeed despite the present system.

2. Educational programs need to focus more on lower cost, process, and access—not content, which is ever expanding and unpredictable. Curriculum committees will never be able to keep up with the pace of change.

3. Brick and mortar needs to be significantly supplemented with digital collaborations in education, research and patient care.

4. Leaderpreneurs need to replace managers and traditional triple threat department chairs.

5. Philanthropy needs to evolve from gifts into investments.

6. The technology transfer model at research universities needs to evolve using a sustainable and effective model, or be allowed to die.

7. Research universities and academic health centers need to embrace community-based innovation.

8. Time-based competencies need to be replace with outcomes based competencies.

9. We need to embrace international students and markets, since a $1 trillion company cannot be created without billions of customers.

10. We need to use new business models to deliver education, resources, networks, mentors, and experiential learning for free using, possibly, expanded WiFi networks and social media.

The first $1 trillion company might be in sick-care or preventive medicine. However, it won't happen until we change the rules of the game allowing barriers to come down, new ecosystems to evolve and new business models erupt that nourish international innovation adoption and penetration.