Tag: Luminary Labs

5 Minutes With Sara Holoubek

Posted on by Lindsey Taylor Wood

Sara Holoubek is the CEO and founder of Luminary Labs, a consultancy focused on operationalizing innovation. We are pleased to have her as a member of this year’s Advisory Board and to hear her thoughts on this year’s SMW!

1. What is your or your organization’s greatest success with social media to date?
In late 2011, we published “The Innovation Myth,” to Slideshare. While it had great traction initially, we were quite surprised when in July of 2012 views skyrocketed. The right person had discovered and share our work and for two days our presentation was one of the most viewed on Slideshare. Unexpected, organic success is always the sweetest.

2. What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in the emerging technology and/or new media space right now?
We are incredibly excited by the number of gurus from Web 1.0 and 2.0 days –  Tim O’Reilly to Esther Dyson to the founders of Invite Media – who are applying their experience and expertise to solve for healthcare. Health tech is hot.

3. What speaker or event are you most looking forward to at SMW NYC?
I’m particularly interested the experiential sessions, installations, and collaborative spaces at the Global HQ at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

4. What prompted you to join Social Media Week’s Advisory Board OR What do you think is SMW’s greatest value add to the tech/media space?
I love how SMW coalesces entire cities around a common theme that transcends any given industry. This idea of inclusion runs contrary to most gatherings, and therefore, yields greater outcomes.

5. What is the most creative way you’ve seen social media used? (This could be a meme, campaign, installation, etc.)
True story: I had been spending the holidays with my family in Wisconsin when the great blizzard of 2011 arrived. Once my flight was cancelled, I spent a few hours desperately trying to find another flight, a train, a car – anything – that would get me back to New York. After tweeting a few updates on the absolute lack of transportation for at least a week, a friend tweeted back that her partner happened to be in Chicago, with a rental car, and did I want to join her for the trip back? Of course I did.

A Student’s Perspective: Frank Moss of the MIT Media Lab Makes Health Innovation A Collaborative Effort

Posted on by smwnyc

Stephanie Vatz is a student at Columbia’s School of Journalism. She is one of ten students providing on the ground coverage of SMWNYC- all from the student’s perspective. She is providing her report from Frank Moss on The 2012 MIT Health and Wellness Innovation Hackathon. You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @stephvatz.

As head of the New Media Medicine group at the MIT, Frank Moss heads entrepreneurial biotechnology projects that attempt to improve health care and medicine.

He displayed inventions like an artificial intelligence nurse that helped record patients’ auditory and visual problems for a real-life while responding to patient concerns to demonstrate comprehension. Using the example of a young woman with diabetes, Moss illustrated how the woman could use the artificial intelligence system to connect with a real doctor and solve her problem more efficiently. The whole system was a bit similar to the way Apple uses artificial intelligence to answer customer support questions.

“We have to combine academia with industry,” he said when discussing the huge risks the MIT Media lab and his own company, BlueFin Technology, try to take when thinking of medical models for the future. “Big companies don’t take risk, but they must have the willingness to take risks and fail.”

Not all of Moss’ projects were as complicated; some even seemed easy to implement into today’s healthcare world. Applications for mobile phones, for example, could be used to improve the likelihood of a patient taking care of himself.

Among the apps that Moss suggested were medical clocks to inform the patient when to take his medication, medical charts so the patient could see the problems for himself and social networking to provide comfort and camaraderie among patients.

A Student’s Perspective: Monday’s Health and Wellness Keynote Speakers Carol McCall and Michael Graves

Posted on by smwnyc

Stephanie Vatz is a student at Columbia’s School of Journalism. She is one of ten students providing on the ground coverage of SMWNYC- all from the student’s perspective. She is providing her report from Carol McCall on Big Data & The Eye of the Beholder and Michael Graves on People First: Redesigning the Hospital Room. You can follow Stephanie on Twitter at @stephvatz.

In the realm of health and medicine, Social Media Week NYC has been bringing technology and humanity to the forefront in some surprising ways.

On Monday at the Saatchi and Saatchi Wellness Hub in SoHo, two keynote speakers, Carol McCall and Michael Graves, discussed improvements and potential solutions to patient care problems.

As the Chief Strategy Officer at GNS Healthcare, Carol McCall’s main job is looking at data. Her presentation however, was more focused on using technology to alter patient behavior both as a preventative health measure and a way for patients with similar experiences to commiserate or share stories.

McCall drew upon examples to illustrate the idea of taking an active role in one’s own health by changing attitude. Her primary interest was patient psychology and she offered techniques to either change people’s perspectives of their own life stories, positively modify self-perception, or find new ways to help people help themselves.

A key theme in Monday’s discussions was innovation. With social media it appears that experience in the field you work in might even be a detriment to thinking outside of the box and shedding new light on old problems.

The second keynote speaker of the morning, world-renowned architect and designer Michael Graves, knew very little about health care until he had to. Graves rolled to the stage in a wheelchair after a CBS Sunday Profiles clip of him finished playing on stage.

In 2003, a mysterious infection paralyzed Graves from the waist down, suddenly making him dependent on others, even inside his own hospital room.

Once he was on stage, Graves pressed a button on his wheelchair that made the front wheels roll under the back wheels until he was tall enough for everyone to see. It was the first example in a string of innovative design to come.

He started his discussion of reinventing in hospital room design by talking about his own frustrating experience of being unable to reach the sink faucet at the hospital, or being able to see himself in the mirror. Constantly, he was reminded that he couldn’t walk anymore.

“Oh, that’s not for me,” he said he once thought about the out of reach faucet, “that’s for people who can walk.”

Now, Graves is dedicating his career to designing new products, furniture and buildings with the disabled in mind. He displayed images of reinvented hospital bedside tables that would be easier for cleaning crews to disinfect, more functional shower stools, chairs that were easier to get out of and patient chairs to make the transition from operating room to hospital room more comfortable. He even made his employees sit in wheelchairs while designing some of the new products for him.

Although Graves couldn’t stand-up himself, his audience stood for him; he received a standing ovation before and after his presentation.

Five Reasons to Visit the Health & Wellness Hub

Posted on by Nicky Yates

In 2012, Social Media Week New York introduces the first Health & Wellness Hub to serve as a platform to empower change in health through collaboration. Hosted by Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness and curated by Luminary Labs, the Health & Wellness Hub will take place at Saatchi & Saatchi’s ground floor auditorium, and offers seating for 400 guests as well as a livestream. The event runs from February 13-17, 2012.

We spoke to Luminary Labs CEO Sara Holoubek on what’s hot at the Health & Wellness Hub.

 
1. It’s about people.
Given the rate at which social technologies are changing the face of healthcare, it is quite easy to get caught up in the tech. And yet solving for health is about humanity. Or as keynote Michael Graves says “People first.” We’ll kick of the week with a human-centered approach to health, from a big data to hospital design to Regina Holliday’s personal story of how she became a patient advocate. Later in the day, participants will roll up their sleeves with Jessica Hammer to learn how to design for desire in health. Also in the spirit of humanity, Johnson & Johnson will close the day with a networking cocktail reception.
 

2. It’s about tech.
We’re going to explore, demystify, and even challenge the role of the technology that is changing the face of healthcare. Frank Moss kicks off the day with a lively discussion of the 2012 MIT Health and Wellness Innovation Hackathon. J.C. Herz will help us unpack the quantified self, followed by a panel on the role of sensors in health. We’ll also explore gaming in the panel, “This Game Will Make You Healthier.”
 

3. We’ll collaborate.
There is no silver bullet in health, and change requires partnership and collaboration. Michele Polz of Sanofi and Aman Bhandari of Health & Human Services will detail how their two organizations partnered to identify new innovations in diabetes. In the afternoon, well take a look at the role of collaboration in wellness, with a keynote from Dr. Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic and a panel on how our perception of beauty affects our behavior and purchase patterns. Last, but not least, participants will get a chance to crowdsource the ideal FDA social media guidelines, as well as comment for the Physician Payment Sunshine Act.
 

4. We’ll Accelerate.
Jay Walker, founder of Priceline and TEDMED chairman & curator will set the stage on Thursday as startups, investors, and strategic partners converge to make it happen. We’re putting the investors in the hot seat, asking them to “pitch” the startups. Later in the day we’ll connect strategic investors and startups via an interactive matchmaking session.
 

5. We’re going to change the game.
We’ll wrap up the week with the ideas and case studies. Participants will get the opportunity to take part in an socially-enabled feedback experiment, learning how little acts of willpower help train your willpower muscle. The week will wrap up with Feast on Health, hosted the fabulous Jerri Chou.

5 Questions With… Sara Holoubek, CEO Luminary Labs

Posted on by alyshadeepfocus.net

This post is part of a weekly series called “5 Questions With…” featuring Q&As with Social Media Week Global Advisory Board members and Event Partners.

Sara Holoubek is CEO of Luminary Labs. Sara founded Luminary Labs as a response to an increased demand for her strategy consulting practice. Read her full bio here.

Q: Tell us about your background with Luminary Labs and what the organization’s major goals are for 2011.
Sara Holoubek: Luminary Labs was founded to address the needs of industries in transition. As large organizations moved into a post-recession rebuilding phase, they sought to become more resilient in the face of change. In 2011, we will continue to help companies build these business models and introduced new, agile approaches to people, processes, and technology.

Q: When and why did Luminary Labs first get involved with Social Media Week?
SH: Last year we started to develop a strong point of view regarding the role that social technologies can play in the modern organization.

Currently, the majority of social media is focused on satisfying the upper half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: like this, friend me, buy that. We feel strongly that the world has yet to explore how these same technologies can also serve more basic societal needs, such as our health and food systems.

One of the challenges is that those with the knowledge of how social technology works rarely interact with those solving for basic societal needs. We suddenly felt this obligation to introduce the various actors to explore this concept in a participatory fashion. And so Health | Tech | Food** was born. 

Q: What is a major trend you see rising in the social media space?
SH: We are starting to see organizations view social technology as an underlying system, as opposed to just a messaging tactic. This is a welcome change, but will result in significant organizational changes that may be uncomfortable at first.

Q: How do you use social media for both personal and professional use?
SH: Professionally, social media has become a core component of my company’s communication infrastructure. It has become completely interwoven in all of our interactions with the world.

Personally, I have to thank social media for safely delivering me back to New York during the December blizzard. On the eve the storm, I tweeted that I was about to be stuck in the Midwest with no flights, trains or rental cars available. A Twitter follower quickly connected me to a mutual friend in the same situation, but with a rental car on hand. She was just a few hours away, so yes; Twitter is directly responsible for a 16 hour road trip, including the requisite Cracker Barrel stop.

Q: What are you looking forward to the most during Social Media Week 2011?
SH: I look forward to seeing the output of Health | Tech | Food. As an open innovation event, we will publish all of the ideation output so that anyone can take a concept to the next level. 

**Health | Tech | Food is an event to discuss and innovate around the core health issues of New York through the lens of social technology, including four ideation workshops: open source health, food systems, the quantified self and mobile health.

Alysha Lalji is a contributing writer to the Social Media Week blog and works in digital communications at Deep Focus.