The Lean Entrepreneur. Vlaskovits Patrick

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      In the past, a doctor may begin interaction with a patient with an open-ended question, but research has shown that doctors often interrupt the response. The ensuing discussion is directed and manipulated by the physician, who often has preconceived notions about what the patient needs. Patients leave without having all of their questions answered, often feeling disrespected and not fully understanding the treatment plan. This leads to decreased compliance and, in the worse situations, to increased likelihood of litigation if things go wrong. It may also result in worse outcomes.

      In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on patient involvement in medical decision making in which all the possible treatment options and outcomes are outlined and the patient and doctor together make a decision based on patient preferences. This is in direct contradistinction to physicians’ patriarchal, autonomous decision making (telling the patient what treatment comes next) but also is not an open-ended choice given to the patient, who cannot possibly understand all of the consequences of treatment options without guidance from their medical provider.

      CASE STUDY: Customized Value Creation

      Scott Summit, cofounder of Bespoke Innovations, revolutionized the world of prosthetic limbs by combining excellent design with digital fabrication techniques. Here’s his story.

      I set out thinking, “Where can you create things that (1) are very complex and (2) will be meaningful in changing the quality of somebody’s life?”

      As it happens, I was always interested in prosthetic limbs. I saw an opportunity waiting to happen or a solution that is waiting to happen because existing products represent an unsatisfied need. Regular prosthetics are an engineering solution to a problem and not a design solution.

      I thought, “Okay, here is an opportunity to fix that. Maybe I can combine 3D printing, which is the ability to make a unique thing for a unique situation, and prosthetic limbs, which are not very well suited for mass production since that makes generic the complexity and nuance of human individuality.”

      So that became the foundation for Bespoke. We started with prosthetic limbs and that’s still what we do as kind of the flagship, but now we have a number of other opportunities that follow a similar mentality.

      Ultimately, we want to show as much respect for an individual as we possibly can. We use technology tools and the design tools as our vehicle. I think it shows people tremendous disrespect to lump them all into the same category and say, “Okay, you’re all amputees – you all get this part, this collection of titanium machined parts because you’re all that similar.”

      So we rethink that and say, “How do we speak to a person’s individuality and their taste and their uniqueness?”

      The process we take is multifaceted. There’s the “get to know us” process, where we explain to [clients] what we do. We attempt to elicit from them their tastes and preferences in design aesthetic, and that’s actually very difficult to do, harder than I had ever imagined.

      Outside of people who are designers at heart, it’s very hard to thrust somebody into the role of designing something for themselves, something very personal like a prosthetic limb. It’s like the extreme version of telling somebody to design their own tattoo. We all generally don’t do that, because we’re not used to doing that in our daily lives.

      So we typically show people the art we have, the patterns, the designs we’ve done in the past, and we use that as a kickoff point. We say, “By the way, we can change this material. We can add details if you like. If there are patterns that you like..” We try to tease that out of them because ultimately we don’t want them to simply select from our preexisting work. That doesn’t take what we offer to its fullest potential. So we encourage people to cut loose a bit and look inside themselves and see what would make it the most personal and give them the most connection to it.

      Then there’s the technology part of the process. We do a 3D scan of their body and turn the images into usable data by running them through software that uses different cleaning algorithms and meshing algorithms. From that data, we actually mirror the person’s sound-side leg and superimpose it over their lost leg. We align it by eye; there is a lot of craft involved. We line it up until it looks like it is in a natural location on the body based on the scan. That will be the reference for the rest of the process because now the body will be symmetric no matter what we do and it will be unique no matter what we do. The process philosophically goes to the heart of what we do because it generates what we think are the most important elements we offer: symmetry and uniqueness.

      We have a number of templates that we’ve developed, which are partially mechanical and allow us to attach elements to the substructure of the prosthesis. The templates might create the design pattern, for example, herringbone tweed or a lace or a lattice, and we start mixing these templates into the computer files, playing with them to create the aesthetic we’re striving for.

      The final step is that once we have the data, we do a lot of communication with the client. We send them images of the prosthetic, which are photographically accurate even though they’re virtual. When they’re ready to pull the trigger, we send the files out to a third party who three-dimensionally prints the parts. We have a few post-processing steps we can apply depending on what the person is looking for, and then we’re ready to send them to the person.

      How they use them and how their life changes is up to them. We encourage them to communicate back to us when they’re ready, because it’s exciting for us and rewarding. We hear of stories where women all of a sudden are buying clothes to match their fairing. We recently had a case where this woman wore a beautiful dress and shoes that really brought out the best in the fairing we had created for her.

      The woman said she had been creatively hiding her prosthetic for eight years under stockings with foam pads and suddenly she’s wearing skirts that show it as it is and it just looks great and she doesn’t care about people seeing it and knowing that she’s an amputee.

      We’ve had soldiers, guys who don’t express emotion readily, say they feel naked without it or they wouldn’t walk out the front door without it. We’ve had people come to us and they have a gym sock pulled up over their prosthetic limb and they have three or four other socks stuffed into it to approximate a calf shape. People are mostly not comfortable with the fact that a part of their body is a bunch of skinny little titanium pipes; it’s disheartening. So this process gives the prosthetic a dynamism, a suggestion of life. Even though intuitively we know better, it suddenly imbues the prosthetic with a sense of life that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

      We look at our business as a fundamental departure from the traditional thinking, which is to do a ton of research up front, market-research the hell out of it, focus-group it, and throw in a ton of investment hoping that you’re going to capitalize on the backside with a huge return on investment.

      We’re saying let’s turn the whole thing on its head. Have a very nimble process where we can print one thing and if we think it’s valuable and compelling, it can become an entire product line, because we don’t have inventory; we print to order. If the next person walks in the door and says, “Hey, I’ve got this thing – my neck muscles gave out,” we’re ready to go and can do a quick scan and before they leave we can have a custom product created or at least in the process of being created. You can’t do that with traditional manufacturing.

      When a disruptive technology comes along, it doesn’t just change the way you do things; it changes the СКАЧАТЬ