SONSIEL_Chuck Sacco: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
OR SONSIEL Intro:
Welcome to the SONSIEL podcast, where we host interviews with the most transformational nurse scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Through sharing their personal journeys, we create inspiration, provide guidance, and give you actionable ideas you can use to be a catalyst for change.
Julia Cooney:
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the SONSIEL podcast series, where innovation and entrepreneurship in nursing is what we’re all about. My name is Julia Cooney, I’m a healthcare consultant and a nurse, and a proud SONSIEL founder and board member. Today, I am thrilled to be hosting this podcast with Chuck Sacco. Chuck is at Drexel University and is the Associate Dean for Strategy and Innovation with the Charles Close School of Entrepreneurship and a director with the Laurence Baiada Institute for Entrepreneurship. Welcome, Chuck!
Chuck Sacco:
Hi, Julia. Thank you. So glad to be here today.
Julia Cooney:
Terrific to have you here. I thought I’d give you an opportunity to tell the audience a little bit more about your background and a little bit about the Close School, so I’ll leave it to you.
Chuck Sacco:
Sure, happy to do that. So, as I mentioned, I’m currently at Drexel University, Associate Dean within our Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship, it’s a school dedicated to entrepreneurship. It was actually the first of its kind and it’s an amazing place where students every day, inside and outside the classroom, engage with entrepreneurship, learn how to start new ventures, learn how to collaborate with others, develop a really strong entrepreneurial mindset. And we’ve just done some amazing work over the past eight or nine years in building, launching, and building the school and are doing some really, really interesting programming as well as some research in the areas of entrepreneurship. But my prior life is actually in all software technology companies, I didn’t have a background in higher education, so I started my career as a software engineer, took on a wide variety of roles, both in terms of founding early stage companies, co-founder, founder, early employee, and also ended up in some corporate roles as companies got acquired. So I just had, kind of, an interesting, amazing entrepreneurial journey in a few different industries and decided to try my hand at the higher education world when this opportunity to help build this school at Drexel came up. So a different type of startup inside the four walls of a bigger system, and we’ll talk about that today. I think when we talk about the nursing profession and starting new ideas. So it’s just been a different type of startup, but again, I’ve had an amazing experience and hopefully been able to leverage many of the things that I learned along the way in working with our students and helping them understand what it really means to start something and grow a business. So again, so, so thrilled to be here today and working with you, Julia.
Julia Cooney:
Just delighted, you’re an innovator and an entrepreneur at heart for sure. And I know part of what we wanted to focus on today was the partnership and the program that Drexel and SONSIEL created around nurse innovation and entrepreneurship, and I would love to have you tell us a little bit about that and how you got involved in it, how it came about. I mean, I know SONSIEL is delighted to have this partnership with Drexel but would love to hear more about the program and how it kind of came about.
Chuck Sacco:
Sure, sure, so probably almost a couple of years now, we kind of introduced this to SONSIEL. It was a, through a networking connection, myself and our dean, Donna de Carolis, ended up with an initial meeting to meet with the SONSIEL leadership team, really understand what it was about, we knew we knew nothing about it. We didn’t know that any association like this even existed, so to be introduced to it, we were like, we’re knocked out of our socks. It was like, wow, this is really amazing. This is such an innovative association to support nurses in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship, and in a way that we didn’t even think about or understand at the time. So we got introduced to Rebecca Love, who I believe is the founder of SONSIEL, with the rest of the leadership team, and we just started to have a conversation about what you guys are doing there, the value that you’re creating for nurses. And it just seemed really clear fit with us and the kinds of things that we’re doing in the areas of entrepreneurship and thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship, not just in context of starting a company, but also in terms of how do individuals inside organizations think about entrepreneurship and innovation and launch new ideas, launch new products and services, or even just be innovative and the kinds of things they do every day. So, just, I think we hit it out of the gate with an amazing center. It’s like, oh, my God, this is like there’s so much potential here to do some good together.
Julia Cooney:
Well, and I’ll say we certainly at SONSIEL all recognize the absence of really good programming for nurses who want to be innovators and want to have some idea around a product or want to be an entrepreneur, and so it was quite serendipitous to be connected with Drexel. I mean, the program over the two days is really so powerful. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about how you created the curriculum and the content, and was there ever original interest in kind of doing this in the nursing and in the healthcare space? Because I know it can be a bit of a unique beast.
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, you know, I think when we looked at it first began to understand, obviously, Drexel has a school of nursing, so we do have some association with our nursing program, but we hadn’t really gone very deep with them in terms of really doing anything, and a lot of that sometimes has to do with just academia and how sometimes it, we try to be interdisciplinary, but sometimes it can be a little bit difficult. That’s just, that’s not just Drexel, that’s really all of academia. So we’ve certainly dabbled in collaborations with many of our other academic units here. But in the interest of SONSIEL, seeing that you guys are going to be able to move very quickly on something, and obviously, I had a network of individuals that could really see value in what you were offering. And for us, not being experts in any way, shape, or form in the field of nursing, but hopefully being experts in entrepreneurship and understanding that entrepreneurship is, is, again, it’s not just about starting a company, but it’s also about how you think, how you act and what you do in your life and your career. And again, going back to the early meetings where those synergies seem to really fit all together. So looking at what the goal is at SONSIEL, your mission and vision, what you’re trying to do, along with our area of expertise, what seemed to be a really good fit was to essentially take some of the coursework and programming that we had already created and build a version of it that worked for SONSIEL and build something again that was going to be interesting, interactive, educational, and having to do with how do you empower nurses to take new ideas and do something with them? And that was really our starting point, and that’s a big part of entrepreneurship, right, it’s about taking action. But oftentimes all of us, when we have a new idea, it’s like, I don’t know what to do with this, I have no idea even where to begin, right? So we know how to do that. And that was, I think, where we said, let’s build a program that was really focused on that as a starting point, essentially.
Julia Cooney:
And I know one of the suggestions you had early on to us was let’s mix the faculty and bring in some examples of nurse innovators and entrepreneurs to make the content a bit more relevant to our audience, which was nurses. Any thoughts on how that all came about and your perspective on those guest speakers?
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, I still talk about this a lot, that, the real power of our partnership is really that, that we’re bringing what we know from an educational perspective and some of the research and what are best practices in entrepreneurship, especially when you think about launching new ideas and also in terms of developing an entrepreneur mindset. But what SONSIEL brings to the table are amazing guest speakers, it’s almost like the case study, right? Guest speakers that have the practical experience that can relate to the nursing profession. So as I said earlier, nobody in the school of entrepreneurship here at Drexel is a nurse, so we don’t have the credibility nor the background, but what you’ve been able to do is bring the speakers that bring the credibility and the background and essentially the case study version of it. Oftentimes in courses that we deliver, all universities do, case studies are sometimes a very powerful tool to help someone learn. So the guest speakers essentially become the case studies portion of the content. And it’s just a perfect ideal model, I think, for any educational institution partnering with an organization like SONSIEL.
Julia Cooney:
Did you hear anything or did anything strike you as different or unique as it relates to the innovation and entrepreneurship case studies in healthcare by nurses? Did anything strike you as interesting?
Chuck Sacco:
Everything to me. I mean, I love to learn about new things, and I love to learn about new industries, new things I don’t know about. Just really hearing the range of problems, the range of problems that are faced at the bedside just in the healthcare system. And some of the examples that were given in terms of even things like how IVs are delivered right, or how, you know, how you might have to maneuver a patient, kust kind of mechanics of things, just like day-to-day problems that are faced by nurses that either we don’t know, right, generally, and people that aren’t nurses, or just take for granted and also seeing the things that are probably even the nursing profession sometimes like, well, that’s how it’s always been done and realizing there are so many problems that can be fixed. And I think that’s what really struck to me and listening to the various speakers just again, that range of problems and then the creativity of coming up with solutions, new ideas. Because nurses, especially at the bedside, but anywhere in the healthcare system, they’re dealing with it every day, and they can see how some of these problems could be fixed or are probably frustrated that they’re not being fixed. Hence this program hopefully gives someone the tools and the resources and helps them really visualize what they could possibly do to fix some of these problems. But I was always, every time we gotta get speakers like this, this is such a cool story about how this particular problem was, you know, is being handled today, and here’s the solution for it.
Julia Cooney:
Well, I mean, we like to say that nurses are the MacGyvers in healthcare, and I think, you know, some of those guest speakers, whether they were doing innovation and entrepreneurship inside the walls of a health system like you mentioned, or whether it was in a life sciences company or they were creating a product, it was a pretty broad range of the different experiences. I’m curious because the audience, the participants were all nurses. Was there anything that struck you about having that kind of an audience of one profession? I think we had 40 in each of the courses that we did.
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, probably, we’ve done this a couple of times now in terms of these weekend sessions. I think I was intimidated at first because I was nervous about, wow, I know nothing about nursing, I know a lot about entrepreneurship, but I was hoping that they would see me as somewhat credible. And I think out of the gate, I said, look, I have great background in entrepreneurship and education of entrepreneurship, but not about nursing. So I hope you forgive me that, you know, I’m going to shepherd you through this journey, this over the weekend, but you’re going to have to help me understand your profession and your field, and hopefully, we come together. And I think it worked out in both cases that we kind of struck a chord. And again, bringing in the guest speakers was that bridge, and as well as the SONSIEL organization with you and Rebecca and others that were able to also talk and present and help lead panels, that it was, again, a wonderful bridge between the general, I say that kind of the general world of entrepreneurship, the general aspects of it and nursing, because, you know, entrepreneurship is wide, right? It’s a horizontal, right? Entrepreneurs are everywhere in every field, every industry, and we can’t obviously be experts in all of them, but again, in partnering, it really is a perfect, perfect combination, perfect brew.
Julia Cooney:
Well, I know certainly the feedback that we got was the content was so robust and there was so much to learn, and it was an intense two days over a weekend, and I know the feedback that we got from many of the participants was, I feel like I’m, I now have a place to go, I’ve got the beginnings of my learnings, the beginnings of my knowledge, because I think for so many nurses, they don’t know where to go. They have ideas, they want to innovate, they want to be entrepreneurs, but they don’t have the basic steps. And I was really struck by just the life cycle that you took the participants through and all the core learnings that people had. I know we got an enormous feedback from people about how it kind of jumpstarted for them their efforts and their interest. Having attended the program, I was struck by the enormous breadth and depth of your practical experience that you brought, Chuck, to the content. When did you recognize you were an innovator, that you were an entrepreneur? You mentioned it a little bit at the beginning, but I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, it wasn’t out of the gate. It wasn’t one of those things that out of college I was like, okay, I’m going to start companies and so forth. When I graduated college, startups weren’t really thought of in the same way they are today. They were really thought of as small businesses. And the way you think about getting investment for your startups today isn’t the same, there was no Shark-Tank-type thinking, and, or startups early in the popular culture. But it was really, I think, when when the Internet era really started to take off, and so we’re talking about the late nineties or early 2000s when you could see that technology, and I was, always had a bug for technology. You could see how technologies could do some really cool and interesting things. And that’s when I got really excited because prior to that I had helped start companies, but again, we never really thought of ourselves as innovators and entrepreneurs, we thought of ourselves as small businesses. So it was really, again, for my, in my mind it was really about technology and how technology could be used to solve a wide variety of problems or fulfill a wide set of needs, and that there was a big opportunity to take technologies into new places. And that got me started in terms of starting some additional businesses, one of which was in the mobile app technology space for the hotel industry, and that was one of the big points of my career where I really felt like I was an innovator. I was called an innovator by other people, and that felt weird because I never thought of myself that way. I’m like, I’m just a guy who likes tech and likes doing things and building things and being in the commercial environment. But yeah, so I guess it’s, you know, somewhat fell into it, and I think it was really maybe others recognizing it, not necessarily me recognizing it.
Julia Cooney:
What advice would you give to a nurse innovator, or entrepreneur? And based on the challenges that you’ve had and some of the unique approaches that you’ve had to take, what advice would you give to those who are out there just getting started?
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, so I think the combination of A, taking action, even very a small step to move an idea forward, even just talking about the problem, even just writing down the problem and then theorizing on some possible solutions for it. Just taking these baby tiny little steps ultimately, over time, lead to a whole series of big things that can happen. Taking action, that’s entrepreneurship. It doesn’t happen by just sitting back and waiting for others. It’s like thinking like, you know what? I see that problem. I think I know how to solve that problem. I think I can solve that problem and just actualizing that as much as possible. But with that, also looking at the flip side of it, which is to say what are some key assumptions I’m making though, that I have to figure out? What are some things that if I don’t get it right, that my idea won’t work? So it’s both looking at the opportunity but also looking at the risk and the assumptions that you’re making that could derail the whole thing, and that’s a big part of getting started. You want to go in, you need to be optimistic as an entrepreneur, but you also have to be a realist. And you can’t just do one or the other, you have to balance both of them.
Julia Cooney:
And I think that with a lot of, I thought that was in the content, a really good set of sections that you talked through about really thinking through what’s the downside, what’s the risks, being as positive as you can, but really knowing what the areas are. If you want to innovate, you’ve got to, you’ve got to know what you’re up against.
Chuck Sacco:
Absolutely, that’s so key. It’s de-risking those assumptions and there’s a lot of great research. The good news about entrepreneurship, especially today, there’s so many great resources out there that are out on the web that are easy to find, there’s some great eBooks. One of which we use in the program called, it’s called Talking to Humans, and it’s really about going and meeting with prospective customers early and often, and just like that type of thinking today is just so prominent. And it wasn’t that way even ten years ago, even ten years ago, there weren’t these great tools that entrepreneurs could use to really try to figure out the early stages of what they’re doing. So I think it’s, at first, it’s just, it’s been democratized and just made so much more accessible than it had been in the past.
Julia Cooney:
So thank you, because I think, I think for our nursing community, it may be there, but I don’t think they always know where to go to get it, and so I think the kind of tools and things that the program brought to the forefront was really pretty powerful. So we’ve hosted the program for two consecutive years, and this last year, with all of your help, we got it ANCC approved for contact hours, which is very exciting, 11 contact hours. What do you think the future holds for the program or is there a next stage or level? What do you think it would be? Yeah.
Chuck Sacco:
Yeah, I mean, you really kind of addressed it in the fact like there was so much content, right? And it is almost overwhelming. And what we’re able to do over the course of the weekend is really only scratching the surface. What I think we’d like to see is obviously continue those weekend programs because that format does seem to work and gives everyone a very broad base of content, but also guest speakers and some practical exercises and takeaways. But I think what we’d like to do here at Drexel is figure out which of those areas we could do a deeper dive with. And maybe for a subset of the full audience, but especially as relates to interest areas, what are some ways that we could do a little bit more deeper look at certain areas? So a good example of that might be, we spend very little time in the program talking about how do you raise money, how do you raise capital, that could be a great topic. We could take an existing topic we do spend time on and just do, go in deeper with some more practical exercises, like for instance, we very much focus on how do you interview prospective customers. So we obviously spend time on that, but we could spend a whole day on just developing and executing customer interviews and what do you do with that feedback. So I think these opportunities go deeper in many areas and over time, hopefully, we’re able to build out some more of those types of segments essentially.
Julia Cooney:
Yes, and I thought even just the conversations around what’s the value proposition, someone thinks they’ve got a great idea and they want to innovate around something, but does it have legs, right? Does it, is it a problem others really feel they have? And I think you talked a lot about how do you really understand what the essence of the issue is that you’re trying to tackle.
Chuck Sacco:
Sure, absolutely.
Julia Cooney:
So, you know, I think we all know we’re facing a crisis in nursing with retention issues and burnout and nurses looking to leave the profession. And part of what SONSIEL’s mission is to keep nurses in healthcare at the bedside and in an ecosystem. How do you see a program like this kind of addressing that challenge for nurses?
Chuck Sacco:
That’s a wonderful question because that’s something we all see, obviously, that you don’t have to be a nurse to know that’s a big problem right now. You want to always look at entrepreneurship as being something very hopeful, right? It’s very future-oriented. And I’m hoping that through programs like this that we’re giving people that are in the nursing profession just a better future orientation. Thinking about the world in context of, there are a lot of problems out there, yeah, and a lot of stresses and strains, but these are things that can be solved. And to be thinking of yourself as a problem solver and think of yourself in terms of recognizing that there are opportunities to solve those problems that may or may not make a lot of money, but that’s almost not the point. The point is just to have that orientation to say, you know what? Yeah, this is broken. But you know what? I can be the person that fixes that, or I can build a team of people that can fix it and address it. And just having more of that hopeful future orientation to say, let’s not just complain about the problems, let’s fix the problems. And it’s frustrating, and I know sometimes people feel powerless and in any industry and I’ve no doubt the nursing industry is feeling powerless, is probably comes with the territory sometimes. But I think trying to change that mindset and orientation is what entrepreneurship is all about. You know, Julia, we talk about, in the program, as you know, we talk about the entrepreneurial mindset and we kick off the program talking about that, we have a tool that helps measure the entrepreneurial mindset, and the entrepreneurial mindset is about those things. It’s about how can you develop yourself as an individual no matter what you do in life, to be more entrepreneurially minded and think like an entrepreneur. You may never start a company, but if you can think and act entrepreneurially and everything you do in life in your career, I think can probably be in a much better spot down the line.
Julia Cooney:
You know, that’s a very, for often for the nurse at the bedside, they don’t feel that they have a level of control. And I think if they do think of themselves as that entrepreneur, that they can innovate in the space and that they’re given the tools and encouraged by their organization or by themselves to think through and how to, how to drive for change. I know, you and I have had the conversation that we truly believe that for healthcare transformation to really occur, nurses have to be at the core of it, and we need to arm them with the confidence and with the knowledge, right, that they can be entrepreneurs, they can be innovators. And a program like this allows them an opportunity to become more confident because they’re learning things they would never have learned in their nursing practice. It’s, this is so very different. And, but it is so crucial for them to feel like innovators and entrepreneurs and being able to move forward and tackle the challenges that they have. This has been a lovely conversation. As we start to wrap up, I just want to, is there any advice or one thing that you would like to leave with our audience today? Chuck, I’ll let, I’ll leave.
Chuck Sacco:
Sure, thanks, Julia. I mean, yeah, I mean, so much. But maybe this ties to maybe what we’re just talking about to some degree, which is that when you see problems that need to be fixed and it can be frustrating. And hopefully what we’ve done in the program is designed it in a way that you can see ways that you can try to fix those problems and be entrepreneurial and develop new ideas inside the system, but also know that if you get so frustrated, you feel like you’re banging head against the wall, that you know the steps that you need to take if you decide, You know what, I can’t do this inside the system. I need to do this on my own, I need to take this out of the system and that, you know, the things that you need to do so that you’re not putting your career and livelihood or anybody else or finances at risk, that you can do things in a very measured way. You know, sometimes people think entrepreneurs are big risk takers, that they just jump off the mountain without a parachute and somehow survive, and so forth. And that’s actually, can be further from the truth. The best entrepreneurs manage risk. They know what the risks are, and they set themselves up in a way that they mitigate risks and do it in a way that, you know what? If it doesn’t work out, you know, there’s other pathways forward and we’re going to make sure that we align our career goals and what we’re trying to do in a way that we can be and think and act entrepreneurially, whether we’re starting a company or whether we’re working inside a larger organization, that’s what I’m doing today. Yeah, I’ve started companies, but then I found my way into a, you know, Drexel University is very large, 15,000 undergraduate students, 25,000 students across all programs, and 6000 or so employees, I think, we’re a very large organization. Yeah, I can be entrepreneurial inside this organization because I have the opportunity to be part of something that when we set out to do something unique and different, that was there for me to work on. So that’s my big takeaway. You can be an entrepreneur inside an organization, you can be an entrepreneur outside the organization. There are many ways to do it, don’t think it’s just one way or the other.
Julia Cooney:
No, that’s, and truly, you showed your innovation and entrepreneurship by how quickly we pulled the program together. I mean, you all were receptive, it was a different audience, it was a different group to reach out to nurses. And you all said, let’s do this, let’s make this happen, and it’s been and it’s been really exciting for us at SONSIEL to be able to offer to the nursing community a program that is as unique as this one is and is so filled with enormous content and so much learning with that blend, as you’ve said, with so our nursing colleagues. So, well, I think we’re going to wrap up and I, Chuck, I just want to say thank you to you and all your colleagues at Drexel University and the Close School for the partnership that we have, it’s a wonderful one. I think we’re making headroads into helping nurses become the innovators and entrepreneurs we know they can and should be.
Chuck Sacco:
Thank you, Julia, and thanks to our team here at Drexel, our dean, and my colleagues that worked developing the program, the relationship with SONSIEL, and just everything that we’ve done here. So it’s a team effort on all sides, no doubt.
Julia Cooney:
Well, thank you. And to our listeners, if you’re a nurse, you’re looking to further your knowledge and your skills as an innovator or as an entrepreneur, please consider obviously attending some of the offerings that SONSIEL does, but in particular, check out our, check out the Drexel-SONSIEL Certificate program. It’s unique, it’s one of a kind, and we are delighted with our partnership with Drexel University. Thank you, Chuck.
Chuck Sacco:
You’re welcome, Julia. Thank you.
OR SONSIEL Intro:
Thanks for tuning in to the SONSIEL podcast. If today’s podcast inspired you, we invite you to join our tribe or support our mission by visiting us at SONSIEL.org. That’s S O N S I E L .org.
Sonix has many features that you’d love including powerful integrations and APIs, automated subtitles, automated translation, secure transcription and file storage, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.
