What do you do with an MBA, an MSc, a PhD, and an MD?  Our guest, Suman Lal, has the answer:  start an innovation studio inside an innovation center within the most innovative square mile on the planet.  Suman had and did all of these things:  an MBA from the Sloan School of Business, an MSc in molecular genetics  and a PhD in oncology  from National University of Singapore,  an MD from Mahama Gandhi University and, now, he’s managing the Technology Innovation Studio inside the Cambridge Innovation Center at Kendall Square, the home of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and countless high-tech and biotech companies.  Innovative he is.  We don’t want to give away the juicy bits, but in a wide-ranging … OK, rambling … discussion with  the team from Failure — the Podcast / Innovation Blab, Suman revealed an entrepreneurial flair that would make PT Barnum blush.

We’d thought we’d learned from a prior guest to this august podcast that Big Pharma could provide cures for more diseases, if only flaws in America’s third-party payor health care system could be fixed.  Today’s guest is not so sure of that.  Dr. Seth Powsner, a professor at Yale and a practicing ER physician, says that it’s really a question of will: the collective will of a nation to solve a problem.  That’s especially true when it comes to curing diabetes.  Sure, a cure might be around the corner, but more likely, it’ll take the will the people and the government to solve the obesity crisis.  And, by the time we belly up to that bar, it might be as well to simply start eating better.  That may prove a better cure than even Big Pharma can provide, with or without an adequate reimbursement mechanism.

Join the team from Failure - the Podcast (a/k/a Innovation Blab) as they stumble upon the dark underbelly of Big Pharma.  Our guest, Imran Nasrullah, has 25+ years of experience in the industry, specializing in drug licensing and business development.  He tell tales that few know or want to believe.  One in ten thousand, for example:  9,999 candidate drugs tested and rejected for one that makes it to the next stage-gate.  Few drugs make it through all the hurdles, but a surprising number that do are cures — not merely daily, weekly or monthly treatments.  Unfortunately, the most efficacious drugs aren’t necessarily the ones that either the makers want to make or insurers want to pay for.  Is there a better way?  Who knows.  Join Jeff, David and Mark wrestle with Imran Nasrullah’s picture of a dark aspect of the U.S. health care system which, like democracy, seems the worst there could be, except for all others that have been tried.

Join the Innovation Blab (a/k/a Failure - the Podcast) in a double-header. A two-fer. “Episode 80 - Broken Down Cars” and “Episode 81 - The Singularity is Nigh.” Our special guests are … well … special.

Milind Sawant is an AI guru, currently with Siemens Healthcare and leading a team of 50 engineers and a $15M budget to drive AI integration into medical systems.  It’s no surprise that Milind is a big fan of AI and the promise it brings to healthcare.  That shone through despite Jeff’s probing questions, Dave’s skepticism and Mark’s snoring.  (OK, we exaggerate:  Mark was no noisier catching Zs than a former president at a felony trial).

Who knew that podcasts could be so much better than watching a felon anoint a faux hillbilly as successor-in-chief before a cheering crowd in red?

Catch them on a good day, and we suspect that many an entrepreneur would say that bootstrapping a business is like a bowl of cherries, pits and all. Leaving aside the independently wealthy, that more traditional approach may destine the enterprise to slower, bounded growth. A lifestyle business. One that’s likely to yield more pits than flesh early on, but that with the right mix of hard work, pivots and luck can be fruitful in the long run.

Nasty, brutish and short might be what you hear of startup life from founders who took outside investment. Not all of them. Not all of the time. But, we bet they skew more that way on the spectrum than do the lifestyle-istas. What would you expect? Take on an angel investor and there’s one more mouth to feed. Take on venture capital and it can be a vicious, gaping one.

Join the Innovation Blab in a conversation with Thomas Collet, a serial entrepreneur who’s on his seventh startup. Would Thomas describe his experiences as bowls of cherries or nasty, brutish and short? Listen to today’s episode and you may find out.

Ask an entrepreneur: “what keeps you up at night?”  They’ve heard The Question before and have an answer at the ready.  But they’ll make you wait through a feigned moment of reflection before they launch into it.

Investors play the game, too.  Get a group of them together and, invariably, one of them will pose The Question whenever an entrepreneur does a pitch.  All present will nod knowingly as the collective’s secret weapon is unleashed.  The entrepreneur’s perfectly timed pause, then, answer (the latter, offered with the gravity of a Churchill wartime address) only add to the excitement.  Theatrics and reality merge, and all present will walk away convinced of the truth of the seemingly revelatory moment.

Join the Innovation Blab in a discussion with Jamie Magrill and Anna Frumkin of DECAP Research and Development, Inc., a Canadian startup that aims to change the way hospital and healthcare workers dispose of syringes.  Don’t worry, we don’t pose The Question to Jamie and Anna.  We do get close, however, and some may find the discussion that ensues amusing.  Have a listen …

Election fever.  With all the news, who can avoid it?  Not a news ticker scrolls by without a mention of Biden's age, Trump's trials and RFK's betrayals.   We're not immune to it.  So when a scheduled guest went AWOL, we figured we'd talk about the first thing that came to mind.  Suffice it to say that MAGA conservatives aren't the only ones who hang out in echo chambers.

For students, taking classes on innovation is like getting car privileges without having to do house chores.  Why drudge through grammar, civics and science, when you can get right into learning how to make billions.  That’s how Zuck did it:  he skipped his classes at Harvard, spent a little time with the Winkelvoss twins and, voila, Facebook.  Easy peasy?   Some of us think not.  Join us in a discussion with Diane Bouis, director of MedTech Innovator, the world’s largest life science startup accelerator program, and judge for yourself.

Not that we have a vested interest, but we’d suggest that Joe Biden make a go at it with a blue baseball cap sporting the acronym MIGA.  You know, “make innovation great again!”  Speaking of innovation, today’s guest is John Daniels, a tinkerer turned entrepreneur who is daring fate by joining the Innovation Blab in a discussion of his latest venture.  It’s developing a rapid diagnostic kit to test for Covid and whatever else ails mankind. With a bit of luck, he’ll launch the product before Kari Lake returns to Arizona politics following a two-year break.

Welcome to Innovation Blab, the B-side of Failure - the Podcast… Innovation and failure are not like yin and yang. They can be complementary, but they are not interconnected and interdependent opposites.  Sounds cool, eh? What it has to do with today’s podcast is anybody’s guess.  Have a listen and judge for yourself.  Our guest is Stefan Koehler, director of therapeutics licensing at the University of Michigan. 

Join the team from Failure - the Podcast in a conversation on the Ukraine crisis with Sam Bendett, an expert on the Russian military with the Washington D.C.-based think tanks CNA and CNAS.

You gotta listen if you are in Sales. And, after all, who isn't? Join the team from Failure - the Podcast in a discussion with Cal Reichwein, former star with the Lafayette Cougars mens basketball team and, now, an emerging star on the Hubspot sales team.

“Back in 5….” What does that mean? Our kids say it on the way out the door, when beef tongue is the evening fare. Do they mean minutes? Never seems that way.

We get it. Not everyone likes beef. It’s a little like this podcast, though, we suspect beef may have more adherents than Failure - the Podcast. Tongue? That’s a different question, at least if you’re talking bovine….

No, it's not the ice cream. It's the podcast. This one, and you can be sure it's in bad taste. But, hey, don't be too disappointed. Before reality sunk in, we did offer you the briefest glimmer of hope. That's more than a certain congressperson from Georgia has done for you….

Sounds promising: fun with numbers. If not the mathematicians and physicists, certainly the accountants might get something from this podcast. And, if not them, the actuaries will have a field day. Think about it: a podcast even an actuary could love. Stultifying….

It took a little doing, but the team from Failure - the Podcast think they found the first use of that magical phrase "testing, testing one, two, three.....". No, it wasn't in 2010, when Biden dropped the F-bomb on an open mic while introducing then-President Obama's eponymous health care bill….

Fintech intelligentsia light up when they hear about new payment processing platforms, sometimes referred to as "rails." It's an allusion to moving goods via railway with tracks, switches, sidings and all those other things grandpa used to reminisce about but that you've never actually seen in person….

Some things just take a long time. The campaigning. The lawsuits. The voting. The lawsuits. The counting. The lawsuits. The re-counting. The lawsuits….