I have spent years working alongside founders who did everything right. Strong teams. Early traction. Encouraging pilots. FDA clearance in hand. And still, too many of those innovations stalled—not because they failed scientifically, but because they collided with a system that was never designed for adoption.
I have sat across from teams that had the data, the regulatory pathway, even a term sheet—and still could not get a health system to move from "interested" to "yes." Not because the science was wrong, but because the evidence did not answer the questions the system was actually asking.
That pattern, repeated across hundreds of companies and dozens of health systems, is what led us to rethink our entire approach.
The Adoption Gap
Healthcare does not fail for lack of creativity. It fails at the moment ideas meet reality.
Clinicians need evidence that a solution improves care without adding friction. Health systems need operational fit and a clear economic case. Payors need proof that outcomes justify cost. Startups need capital and customers aligned to real demand—not theoretical markets.
Each of these perspectives is rational on its own. Together, they form a system that is extraordinarily difficult to navigate without intention.
When those perspectives are misaligned, innovations fall into what I think of as the adoption gap—the space between "this looks promising" and "this is now standard practice."
That gap is quieter than failure. It does not announce itself. It shows up as pilots that never convert, as meetings that go well but lead nowhere, as investors who say, "come back when you have a health system partner" while health systems say, "come back when you have more data." It is where time, capital, and trust are lost—often before anyone realizes what happened.
This is why so many health and medtech startups never reach commercial scale, and why even fewer breakthroughs translate into durable impact. The issue is not talent or ambition. It is that we continue to treat a system problem as a startup problem.
Translation Is a Discipline, Not a Phase
Most industries reward speed and iteration. Healthcare rewards evidence, alignment, and readiness.
Too often, teams discover this late—after they have burned precious runway optimizing for metrics that do not matter to the people who will ultimately say yes or no. By the time health systems, payors, or strategic partners are engaged, the evidence does not answer the questions that actually determine adoption.
We learned this ourselves, the hard way. For years, we watched promising companies move through our ecosystem and struggle at the same inflection points. We had the relationships. We had the programming. But we did not have a system that reliably connected those assets to the moments when founders needed them most.
Translation, done well, is not an afterthought. It is a discipline.
It requires building the right evidence for the right audience at the right time. It means engaging stakeholders before assumptions get locked in. It means shifting from asking "Can this work?" to "Will this be adopted, sustained, and paid for?"
That shift is subtle, but it changes everything.
Why Networks Matter More Than Ever
In healthcare, outcomes improve when people are connected, informed, and aligned.
Founders make better decisions when they understand how their evidence will be evaluated downstream. Health systems move faster when they have early visibility into solutions designed with operational constraints in mind. Payors engage more constructively when economic assumptions are explicit from the start. Communities benefit when lived experience informs what gets built—not just what gets funded.
This is the network effect in health innovation. Not networking for its own sake—we have plenty of conferences and pitch competitions—but structured connection that reduces friction and increases learning velocity.
When those connections are intentional, when stakeholders engage around shared problems rather than transactional asks, the ecosystem itself becomes more capable of translating innovation into impact.
The future of health innovation will not be written by lone geniuses or isolated startups. It will be written by systems that learn faster, collaborate earlier, and take responsibility for adoption—not just invention.
Why Philadelphia
Philadelphia is not just dense with healthcare assets. It is dense with decision-makers who can say yes.
Within a 30-minute radius, a founder can meet with health system operators, clinical champions, payors, academic researchers, and strategic acquirers. That compression matters. Translation stalls when stakeholders are scattered across geographies and calendars. Here, we can orchestrate the right conversations in weeks rather than quarters.
But density alone does not create impact. What matters is how those assets work together.
The opportunity here—and the responsibility—is to move beyond a loose cluster toward a system designed for translation. One where collaboration is structured, where evidence expectations are shared, and where innovations are shaped with adoption in mind from the beginning.
That belief is what led us to launch The Translation Project™.
Rather than creating another accelerator or another funding mechanism, we are focused on closing the adoption gap—bringing health systems, payors, founders, researchers, and community voices into alignment early, before promising ideas get stranded.
For health system leaders and strategics, this is not about chasing the next trend. It is about shaping a pipeline of innovations that are clinically meaningful, economically viable, and operationally feasible. For founders, it is about building with the end in mind—designing not just for approval, but for adoption.
A Different Standard for the Next Era
The future of health innovation will not be written by lone geniuses or isolated startups. It will be written by systems that learn faster, collaborate earlier, and take responsibility for adoption—not just invention.
If you are a founder, stop optimizing your pitch deck and start mapping your adoption pathway. The investors and health systems you want to impress are asking questions your current evidence may not answer.
If you are a health system leader, engage before the pilot. Your constraints should shape evidence design, not reject it after the fact.
If you are an investor, look beyond the technology and ask whether the adoption pathway is as strong as the science. Capital efficiency depends on translation readiness.
If you are a payor, academic leader, or community voice—your perspective upstream changes what gets built. Waiting until the end makes you a gatekeeper. Engaging early makes you a co-creator.
Ideas matter. But in healthcare, ideas only count when they become outcomes patients can feel and systems can sustain.
As we enter 2026, my ask is simple: before building faster, design for adoption. Before scaling ideas, build the system that can carry them.
That is how innovation becomes impact. That is what we are building here. And we are just getting started.
