Coming up next, AARP Innovation 50+ Live Pitch

"The sixth annual AARP Innovation@50+ LivePitch event will take place Wednesday, April 12 and Thursday, April 13, 2017 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Building on the success of the past five years of unique startup pitch events and programming, the 2017 event will be held in the technology capital of the world. This dual-pitch event is the only one of its kind, bringing together innovative startups pitching before expert judges along with their actual intended end users, consumers whose feedback is gathered and shared real-time.

AARP’s Innovation@50+ LivePitch event is a two day pitch competition for emerging startups in the caregiving technology and financial technology sectors. The event will include keynotes, featured speakers and panels of various thought leaders from around the globe with focus on innovation for the 50+ market..."

I covered it last year. Will do so again next week. Should be very interesting. Hashtag #Innovate50.

UPDATE

Event press release:

WASHINGTON, DC (PRWEB) APRIL 06, 2017: AARP today announced it will unveil highlights from its Financial Innovation Frontiers (FIF) report on April 13th at its sixth Innovation@50+ LivePitch. The event will be held Wednesday April 12 and Thursday April 13, 2017, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Registration is still open at $99.00 for two full days of content. To register, please visit www.innovation50plus.org.

The FIF report was designed to analyze the financial needs and behaviors of consumers aged 50-plus.

“We love unveiling new data at our events, as the findings truly serve as guide posts for entrepreneurs and VCs focused on the 50+ market,” said Jody Holtzman, senior vice president, Market Innovation, AARP. “In this case, we have not seen much industry focus on financial technology solutions for older adults. Yet this is the most financially challenged generation in American history. Although the 50+ segment comprises approximately 35% of the US population, they control more than half of the nation’s investable assets. We are proud to have AARP in a leadership role to inform today’s entrepreneurs and tomorrow’s businesses of the challenges and opportunities their solutions should address.”

Experts from AARP, The Financial Brand, U.S. Bank, and Javelin will discuss the findings and the implications on incumbent banks and emerging startups, in a panel at 11 a.m. PT called the “Clarion Call to Entrepreneurs: AARP Research on the Unmet Financial Needs of Consumers 50+.”

Speakers discussing the report include:

• Gary Koenig, Vice President of Financial Security in AARP’s Public Policy Institute (PPI), leads AARP’s strategy on Savings and Financial Planning. Gary also leads a team of economists, attorneys, and policy experts that analyze and develop policies related to the financial security of the population aged 50+.
• Jim Marous is co-publisher of The Financial Brand and the owner and publisher of the Digital Banking Report. Jim was named one of the most influential people in banking and a top five financial services influencer to follow. He is an internationally recognized industry futurist, and recognized authority on disruption in the financial services industry.

Joining Gary and Jim on the panel are Beth Gallagher Dumke, VP, Product Development & Innovation, U.S. Bank, and Mark Schwanhausser, Javelin’s Director, Omnichannel Financial Services.

AARP’s Innovation@50+ LivePitch event is a two day pitch competition for emerging startups in caregiving health and financial technologies. Each day the event will begin with conference sessions on caregiving, and savings and planning, respectively, related to the 50+ age group. It will include keynotes from Jo Ann Jenkins, CEO AARP, and Jean Chatzky, Financial Editor of NBC’s TODAY Show. Each afternoon, ten finalist companies in each category will present their business plans on stage in three-minute pitches to a panel of judges that includes venture capitalists and angel investors, as well as AARP members.

Previous AARP Innovation@50+ LivePitch events have been held in Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Miami, and last year’s event at Plug and Play Tech Center, Sunnyvale, CA. Of the first 50 finalists, 27 have raised over $175 million in venture investment, and another four companies exited through acquisition.

Additional information, including 2017 sponsors, judges and coaches, as well as programming content and speakers, is available at www.innovation50plus.org.

UPDATE

Of relevance:

Why Digital Health Startups Often Struggle to Meet VC Expectations

Digital health startups that in any way aim to fix–or disrupt–some of the many inefficiencies in healthcare face a tougher road than those startups strictly targeting consumers. But investors may not understand that.

The regulatory complexities within healthcare, coupled with the industry’s notoriously slow adoption of technology, have led many promising digital health startups to fizzle out after failing to realize the growth often seen among their consumer counterparts.

Sherpaa, an app that allows patients to securely text with physicians, is a notable exception, but their road to ultimately being self-funded was not without its bumps.

One digital health company, Sherpaa, beat the odds, but not without a tumultuous foray into the healthcare industry, according to Fast Company, which profiled the digital health app…

Initially, Sherpaa brought on investors who dealt exclusively with consumer technology, assuming that an outside influence would improve the app’s integration into healthcare, according to the company’s founder Jay Parkinson. Instead, Parkinson faced pressure from investors who were accustomed to the growth rates associated with consumer apps, and didn’t recognize the intricacies of the healthcare industry, which is more reserved and slower to integrate new technology.

The problem boils down to unattainably high expectations...

Yeah. In that regard, interesting couple of days ahead.

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MY LATEST READ

Another good one. Stay tuned. Still reading it. A "hive mind" argument to a significant degree.

We would not be such competent thinkers if we had to rely only on the limited knowledge stored in our heads and our facility for causal reasoning. The secret to our success is that we live in a world in which knowledge is all around us. It is in the things we make, in our bodies and workspaces, and in other people. We live in a community of knowledge. 

We have access to huge amounts of knowledge that sit in other people’s heads: We have our friends and family who each have their little domains of expertise. We have experts that we can contact to, say, fix our dishwasher when it breaks down for the umpteenth time. We have professors and talking heads on television to inform us about events and how things work. We have books, and we have the richest source of information of all time at our fingertips, the Internet...

Sloman, Steven; Fernbach, Philip (2017-03-14). The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (p. 13). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"Triangulate" ("hexagonate"?) with these (below) for starters.

apropos of the aggregate topic, see my prior post "Just the Facts..."

Also, a couple of other books of mine come to mind here:

There are more, but these will do for now.

UPDATE:

Relevant to our pending AARP Innovation 50+ conference:

Collective Intelligence and Its Implications 

The notion of intelligence has fostered a deep confusion: We think of intelligent acts as performed by individuals even when communities are really responsible. You can see this confusion in how we think about successful companies. Internet start-up entrepreneurs share a mistaken belief with the rest of us: that ideas matter. It is conventional wisdom that the key to a successful start-up is a good idea that can capture a market and produce millions of dollars. That’s how Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Steve Jobs of Apple did it. Because we assign intelligence to individuals, we give the heroes all the credit by attributing their ideas to them alone. But that’s not how it works, according to some of the venture capitalists who fund new start-ups. As one of them, Avin Rabheru, puts it: “Venture capitalists back teams, not ideas.” 

Consider the view of Y Combinator, one of the leading incubators of early-stage technology start-ups. Their strategy is based on the belief that successful start-ups rarely, if ever, capitalize on their initial idea. Ideas transform. So it’s not ideas that matter the most. Far more important than the quality of an idea is the quality of the team. A good team can make a start-up successful because it can discover a good idea by learning how a market works and then do the work to implement the idea. A good team will divide and distribute the labor in a way that takes advantage of individual skills. Y Combinator avoids investing in start-ups that have a single founder not only because a single founder means there’s no team to divide up the labor. They avoid single founders for a reason that isn’t obvious and yet is fundamental to teamwork: Single founders lack the esprit de corps that prevents individuals from letting their friends down. Teams work harder when things aren’t going well because members encourage one another; they do it for the team. 

Once you accept that we live in a community of knowledge, it becomes clear that most researchers have been looking in the wrong place for a definition of intelligence. Intelligence is not a property of an individual; it’s a property of a team... [The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (pp. 211-212).]

ALSO, A GREAT NEW YORKER ARTICLE

May be paywalled. Well worth your time. A great rumination on the differential particulars of "knowing that" vs "knowing how" vs "knowing WHY." Goes to Daniel Dennett's "competence" vs "comprehension."

ERRATUM

From Science Based Medicine: 

Medical science policy in the U.S. under Donald Trump eighty days in 
A week after Donald Trump was elected, I speculated about how he would affect medical science policy. Now, 80 days into the Trump administration, we have some observations.
David Gorski on April 10, 2017

JUST UP AT DR. CARTER'S EHR SCIENCE

Progress Report: Knee-Deep in Theories, Workflows, and Software Design
by JEROME CARTER

You are probably wondering why there have been so few blog posts in the last few months.   Well, it’s because I ran into a classic chicken-egg problem. With the best of intentions and an optimistic outlook, I set out to write a handbook on clinical workflow analysis and workflow application development. The plan was for a 15-chapter book with the final chapter being a workflow application. The problem appeared in chapters 9-12. These chapters were to include methods and concepts taken from my workflow research over the past few years. However, try as I might, every version of the Chapter 9 that I tried to write eventually came to a halt because it became clear that more background information was required than could reasonably fit in a practical handbook.

For years, I have been wrestling with the idea of a theory that would bring together clinical work, clinical workflow analysis, and clinical care software design. That research (working title, A Theory of Clinical Work and Clinical Systems) has been completed. I decided against taking the time to write a complete account of the theory with a literature review, etc. and instead chose to add relevant parts to the handbook. When I started the handbook, explaining the theory in a few pages, then moving on to the practical aspects of analyzing workflows and creating applications seemed reasonable. Regrettably, every attempt to do that fell on its face. There were too many times when I would have had to ask the reader to accept a concept or term without knowing its complete origin or why I thought it superior to other approaches. No answer appeared...

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More to come...