How Can Startups Navigate the Complex World of Intellectual Property?

[00:00:00] Jared: hello everyone and welcome to the Med Design podcast where we explore the journeys of medical innovators.

Today we're honored to have Laurence Freeman as our guest. Laurence is the CEO of Oakbay LLC, an intellectual property commercialization and business development company focusing on healthcare innovation. With the years of international experience, he's been instrumental in advancing groundbreaking healthcare products and fields such as medical devices, digital health, public health solutions, and pharmaceutical nanotechnology.

His involvement in various ventures, including D Cubed Technologies and Cube Medical Innovations has provided him with a unique perspective on the intersection of data science, ai, and healthcare innovation. In addition to his entrepreneurial pursuits, Laurence is also an adjunct professor of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Denver.

Sharing his knowledge and expertise with the next generation of healthcare leaders, Laurence's diverse experiences and deep understanding of healthcare innovation. Makes him a perfect guest for our podcast, as we explore the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field. So without further ado, let's dive into our conversation with Laurence Freeman.

Welcome.

[00:01:07] Laurence: Thank you Jared. Thank you Ty.

[00:01:10] Jared: We'll just dig in and talk about maybe Oakbay and Intellectual property commercialization a bit. And before we dig in, how would you define intellectual property in the healthcare industry?

When a lot of us think about intellectual property, you see it in the news and I think the most recent thing that was in the news was ed Sheeran getting sued for copying Marvin Gaye's guitar line.

And there's so much more to it. So what can and cannot be considered intellectual property in the healthcare space. And like I said, just what is it in general?

[00:01:39] Laurence: To answer the first part of your question there are four components to intellectual property across the globe.

There are trade secrets. Think of the Coca-Cola recipe, which has been a trade secret for over a hundred years. There are patents design patents, utility patents. There are trademarks. And there are copyrights. So trade secrets, as I've explained, a patent is basically an application that you've made with a in America, the USPTO, United States Patents and Trademark Office.

And if it's approved, legally, that is a claim of ownership for the patents holder. Any infringement by a third party on your proprietary information, which is protected by a patent, basically that third party is liable for action against them. Then trade box, again, I'm bringing Coca-Cola into the equation here, something I don't drink by the way.

And it's the name Coca-Cola. The design of it, the font of the words, the color of it. In fact you'll always see tm next to it. That's a trademark or rm, oh, sorry, R as a registered trademark. Trademarks last a long time, as long as you pay the renewal fee. Give you an example. It's not just names that you could trademark.

You can trademark a scent. Think of Play-Doh. Play-Doh has actually a certain scent about a certain smell that is trademark. Nobody can copy it. Then there is the, if you ever go into the lobby of a Westin Hotel, each and every Westin hotel has that same aroma. Very nice, very pleasant smell that is trademarked so nobody else can use it.

The brown Pantone of a UPS truck that is trademarked. Nobody else can use it. So trademarks do last a long time, like trade secrets, patents, however, don't last as long. A utility pattern last typically 20 years from the date you actually file it. And then a design pattern will last for 15 years from the day you file it.

And then there are plant patents as well that also have a good life. I believe it's 10 years that if you create a new flower or a new plant you can actually take out a patent on it. And then the last category is copyrights. Now copyrights are quite unique because they cover several categories as proprietary ownership, whether it be a book, whether it be a work of art, i e a painting or digital art song as we mentioned before with Ed Sheeran infringing.

Did you say Stevie Wonder? Marvin Gaye, Marvin Gaye's lyric or Music?

[00:04:54] Jared: It was actually his guitar line.

[00:04:55] Laurence: Music. Yep. That's a copyright infringement. Copyrights generally speaking, I always call them the best bang for the buck because they're so little in cost to.

File in the us $65. So if you ever read a paperback book, I still do. I'm not sure others do. And you open up the front cover and then inside there's all the information about the publisher. You'll always see where the circle around it. And the date it was actually the copyright was filed in the US, you filed them with a federal body called the Library of Congress.

Not the USPTO, but the Library of Congress handles copyrights and they're great cause they last a long time.

[00:05:39] Jared: That was awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that explanation. And so, going into the healthcare innovation side, how do you see the role of intellectual property management, in particular in healthcare innovation?

And, really what is its significance for entrepreneurial clinicians and physicians?

[00:05:55] Laurence: It is key. It's all about ownership of a innovation and if you don't want to take out intellectual property on it, and it's a very good innovation and it starts to be a commercial success. It only takes any company in the world to see this fall on their radar, so to speak.

And then they would be investigating through the obvious channels of the databases of intellectual property that exist in WIPO. The World Intellectual Property Office covers a lot of countries in the world. You do a search on that for the name of the company or the nickname of the product and how it works, and it's quite amazing.

How quickly they will find that nothing exists that protects the owner of that innovation. So the reality is they could take that innovation either. Reverse engineer it or just copy it, take out a patent, bang, they own it, because the first to file of any intellectual property that's copyright, trademark patents, even the trade secret, you're not filing.

But the first one to file in those three categories I've mentioned always wins the intellectual property law. it's key that if you want to maintain ownership, And you either, you can just keep it, admit people, a lot of engineers who create innovations file the patterns and then just park it on the shelf.

Or our companies here, IP lawyers here in town who've got a lot of shelves with a lot of patented innovations that just sat there. Nobody really wants to take. The reality is you must protect your innovation.

[00:07:45] Jared: Absolutely. And where I guess along the commercialization process is intellectual property management, most important.

And at what point in the process would a company start working with a company like Oakbay?

[00:07:59] Laurence: Okay, so I often tell people I'm the first man in and the last man out. So the first, so basically what happens is that somebody comes with an innovation and what you need is a strategy built to protect it.

But the first thing you need to do is do an intellectual property search to make sure that this innovation is original. So you're looking at originality, and once you've established originality, then you can go down the various channels, the four channels that I've mentioned, depending on the innovation and Look at what is needed to offer protection to the innovator, then obviously it's a choice.

But at the end of the process when the patents have been filed, that said, but they have filed. The protection of that innovation starts. Obviously time is taken in terms of a patent. It may be two years before the examiner reviews it, and if it's approved, then the innovator wholly owns an innovation.

So in terms of being the last man out, what happens is that when we're creating the strategy, I always ask the innovator, okay, so if everything goes through, what do you want to do with your innovation? There are choices, there are operations. Ie am gonna build a business. And make them and sell them. Should it be a med device or I'm going to sell intellectual property, or I want to license the intellectual property for different ways to do that.

Selling a patterns is like selling a car, selling a house, so that comes at the end of the process. What I don't do is help with operations. That's outside my wheelhouse, these things.

[00:09:59] Ty: Could you speak to the strategy of as far as worldwide patent rights versus just staying within the US Cause there's like a fivefold cost increase and how you go about your provisional patent strategy impacts your worldwide patent rights.

Could you speak to that a little bit?

[00:10:15] Laurence: Yeah, sure. I think you underestimated five times US. It's typically, I've heard of depends on how many countries you want to file in, of course. If you've just spent perhaps $10,000 including filing fees for the US application realistically if you want a full global coverage, or not complete, but a good coverage across the globe start thinking of a hundred thousand upwards.

Yeah. So the eyebrows go up that time. So it's but that's the truth. Realistically filing for a US patent is something that you could do very quickly and initially, and once you get that submitted, cause then you have your filing dates there. So what usually happens in the US is you file, and it's quite unique to the us, you file a provisional patent application acronym, PPA.

So that is actually very low cost, but compared to a full patent application. So in the US and this is not available in most other countries, you file that patent, inexpensive patents. It stays invisible to everybody in the world. It's not even looked at by the examiners, but it's a date line in the sand.

In that period of time, you are working on your innovation, you might want to do a few modifications to improve it, and then at 11 months and two weeks, you file a full patent application in the US and then on the back of that you can file in other countries as well because all the patent applications.

Are consistent with each other, almost like mirror images and be able to file your hundred thousand dollars worth of patent applications. It goes up, of course, if there are any challenges, and the attorney takes time to answer the examiners.

[00:12:17] Jared: Someone's gonna have to raise millions of venture capital prior to even probably going through this process because if you're talking a hundred thousand just for this alone and then you have the lawyer fees and you're paying everybody on the team I can imagine all of this starts to get pretty pricey.

[00:12:32] Laurence: I would say that the savvy startup entrepreneur. Number one, they will bootstrap everything. I always joke that they'll boot them strap themselves so tight that they'll cut off the blood supply to their feet. And then, a lot of people don't realize that intellectual property is so important.

I have my saying of the five mantras of the investor. In order of importance, number one is intellectual property. You own it. If you don't own it, the investor would say, why would I invest in you might be stolen by somebody else. Number two, management. Management. Management. People invest in people.

They're looking for stellar management. Number three is your audience. Who is going to buy it and monetize? And repay the investors at the desired time. Number four is your product. Now, product being so far down the list is significant to take notice of because if you'll have a product that is okay, but you have number two, stellar management. They will make that product stellar, not the other way round. And then number five is barriers to entry. So if you imagine all these five components being in a circle, starting at one at the top, and then finishing with five, next to number one, intellectual property is a key barrier to entry.

So the startup entrepreneur would find out and follow those mantras of the investor if they do require investor funding. Some people are self-funded and things can look very different from that perspective.

[00:14:18] Jared: So essentially that's one of the first investments you're gonna make as a early stage startup.

But I guess. On the flip side, you have worked with Fortune 100, fortune 500 companies. And so how does this strategy that you're talking about change for companies that essentially have just access to far more capital right from the get-go?

[00:14:36] Laurence: Obviously they're not looking at investor funding.

What they're really counting on is that they. Typically, a larger 500 company will have in-house intellectual property attorneys. Let's take IBM for example. I was told by an overseas IBM employee that they have a intellectual property attorney team. I don't know how many's in the team, but what I do know is that they file 100 patents every day of the week.

Wow. And if you were to do any statistics, you can just look up at Google. You know that they are one of the largest intellectual property owners in the world. I'm not gonna say the largest. Cause there are some that are not disclosed, and they file through subsidiaries so it gets fragmented and you can't always tell accurately what's happening.

But IBM is always up there with the most patent application approvals typically every year.

[00:15:40] Jared: Dialing it back just a little bit I forgot to ask you about Oakbay as well. And what inspired you to start Oakbay as a company? What kind of companies do you work with? What kind of products have you guys commercialized.

[00:15:50] Laurence: Let's start at the beginning.

So beginning of the timeline. I created Oakbay based on something that happened within my family from the late 1980s, 1990s, where a family member in the UK created a great innovation and make my father's brother my uncle would tell me about his son, my cousin, how he thought his son was gonna be a multimillionaire.

And he went on with this maybe 18 months, maybe two years, I can't remember. But what happened was that he didn't become a multimillionaire because it wasn't protected with intellectual property and a r esearch laboratory in another part of the world found out what it was and created the improved version using the basis of what my cousin had created as that, and they patented theirs and that was it.

Game over. So that story, my uncle was heartbroken and that story never left me. And an opportunity came up in 2013 and I thought I'll just investigate this. And I took some time off and did my due diligence. I was back here in Denver, and I decided, number one, I'm gonna stick with healthcare.

So I had a lot of lifelong experience. All my working life, I've worked in healthcare. And number two I don't enough research to find out who was doing what and what did I have competition? Yes, but did I have as much competition as I thought that might be IBM wasn't one of my competitors because they did everything inhouse.

I was going to do it for outside clients. 2014, I decided that I would do a soft launch just to make sure that I wasn't talking to people like IBM who thought I was talking nonsense accents aside. And then I formed my company, Oakbay in 2015. The reason I picked Oakbay is that when you are picking a new name of a company you would spend a lot of time going through Google, and other search engine s to try and find something original.

And I spent a couple of days doing this and all variables of Oak Bay is actually the area that I lived in when I lived in British Columbia, Canada. It's on Vancouver Island and lo and behold, as one would, Oak Bay was two words there. Oak Bay, it was like, ah, the hallelujah moment arrived.

And 10 minutes later, and I think it was $50 that was mine. That was a big relief. Actually. That was one of the biggest reliefs of the process. Cuz whilst you have a business idea, if you haven't got a name for your company, it's difficult to jump off the starting blocks. So that's how I got in.

That's how Oakbay evolved, was born. And then I moved into 2015. I was spent a lot of time networking to find out who was of value in the specific med device and pharma and looking at the nanotech connection with it. But gradually through my network. I realized that pharma was very difficult to do it.

But what put me off with pharma was the timeline from innovation to monetary fruition. And you can go through 15, 16 years. However, in year 12 or year 13, it might fail the class three trials, clinical trials. So I decided if I get involved with that, I may not be alive long enough to see how these actually, if they mature and come to fruition.

I made an executive decision to stay away from pharma and for the duration of the process anyway. And then stuck with med device, which is more of a shorter timeline and when I got to know how things worked on the med device side, I enjoyed that. I worked with a very nice gentleman called Tom Shilling who is a very competent FDA regulatory and compliance gentleman.

I networked with Dr. Arlen Meyers, who's been one of your guests. Also personal friend of mine as is Tom. And we do a lot of cross pollination in the networking and introductory field. On the med device side, as there is a timeline because there's originality, there is objectivity.

Proof of concept, doing all the trials, and if there is a 510K requirement, then there is the FDA journey. However, what I did find out through Tom, and I don't know whether many people in the audience will know this, but if you were to do an FDA application, typically there is maybe nine months to 18 months in that timeline.

You can, if you have an extra eight to $10,000 available, there are companies out there that once you have completed that application, you can actually submit it to one of those companies and they will check every letter of every word, of every sentence, of every paragraph in that application to make sure that it is 100% perfect.

Typically takes two weeks. You can, you get it back, you submit it to the FDA. Tom told me that the fastest he's ever had one approved was 19 days. Wow. But you have to have that eight to $10,000 at the front end which is actually faster than when they created the fast track FDA compliance during the time of the Covid pandemic.

You get to know these things by networking. Some of the projects that I brought to help monetize ladies health too, med devices there I can't say too much because I still have not valid non-disclosure agreements on these. And when you're in Denver, you don't want to burn your reputation.

Absolutely. Or anywhere for that matter. The biggest, hardest part of any of this, especially in the digital healthcare world, is getting the proof of concept, the trials.

Cause when you submit them, say digital healthcare, you need a hospital, either an individual hospital or hospital network to try it out for me to make sure it works. And the actual process, timeline process of ringing that doorbell sitting down at the table with the people that make the decisions, providing you've got the right people at the beginning.

And then waiting for them to say yes or no could take six months doing that. And in that six month period, nobody knows that this is going on. And there's new innovations piling in. So digital health is actually a very challenging situation to get proof of concept.

[00:22:46] Jared: I can imagine that you could expose yourself to some level of risk during that period of time to get outcompeted and sure enough, something hits market and you're like, oh, dear.

And we're still in our trial phase.

[00:22:57] Laurence: That's the point. Yeah. The hardest part is that if you've applied for a patent and it's been approved and there's been somebody else out there that didn't apply for a patent, but created a trade secret strategy before your patents, and you get there and you sat around the table with the CMO, the CFO, the CIO, the CEO, and you are telling your audience there how everything is so fantastic with your innovation.

It's the best thing that's ever happened. This will be so wonderful for you. And they will tell you what, we've been using that for a year. Oh God. It's like devastating. And you might have done your due diligence Yeah. To do the research for originality. This is what happens with a trade secret.

[00:23:41] Jared: Yeah. It's very sneaky. It sneaks up on you. We did get an interesting question in the q and a and I think we should address it. So she says, engineers, we're constantly innovating and creating new solutions, as you mentioned. And how do we recognize when something is both novel and worth pursuing for ip.

[00:23:58] Laurence: So there are two categories here that I want to briefly mention, if she's an employer, she has her own company and she has people working for her as engineers typically in their employment agreements, there is non-disclosure, non-compete, non circumvent. And basically any intellectual property that's created with those criteria in their employment agreement typically belongs to the company.

Now, it depends on the company as to how it's worded. There's one particular example I know of where this particular person that is works for a company, very large company. Privately owned company, 4 billion a year in revenues, and he works as the innovator. He is the inventor on the patents application, and once the patents has been approved or not approved, let's talk about, approved. The company own it exclusively for five years, and then they can transfer ownership to the inventor after that five year point. In some cases, that's very unusual, but it's a very large company and they're great with their employees. There is another type where the company will own it forevermore or for the life of the intellectual property, and there are other companies in their agreement where there may be a joint ownership, innovator and employer, there are different ways that cake becomes So as an employee, Connie will have signed employee agreements.

Obviously, whatever's in the employee agreement will clearly state. On paragraph titled Innovation and Intellectual Property, it's hard for me to know what the direct answer will be, but there are variables of an answer.

[00:25:51] Ty: Maybe one way we could, she's as an employee, but also if you could touch on maybe worth pursuing for IP as a business consideration because filing for a patent and getting a patent awarded isn't necessarily a market signal that it will be a commercial success.

[00:26:06] Laurence: That's true. But if you, as an employee, you went somewhere. Even as a student in the university system, you come up with an innovation and there was one here in Colorado can't remember which school it was, whether it was Denver or Boulder. Somebody came up with an innovation and he filed his intellectual property and it was approved.

He went into business with it. And he made some really good money with it. And two years later, after started business, he got a phone call. Congratulations. This is the Colorado Tech Transfer Office. Ooh. And we are so pleased with you. And, we saw from the writer that gave the history that you were a student of ours.

And while you were a student of ours, you. Created this innovation. Oh, we're so happy for you. By the way, you owe a 75% of every dollar you've made profit. Yep.

[00:26:58] Jared: Yeah we had a very similar instance happen. Actually I had a radio show in college and there was a huge record label that kind of got birthed out of that radio station in college.

And once they found out about this label and their success, same thing happened. They got a phone call, they got actually a lawsuit involved in it. Oh. And they got their money the laws, held up after all. Yeah. And ever since that, I remember them even telling us like, if you're gonna pursue anything that comes out of this, name it something different, whatever it is call it something else because you want to if you have your community here, that's fine.

But if you're actually gonna name it the same thing and carry it forward after, birthing it here in college or within the school you know you're in trouble. That's

[00:27:43] Laurence: right. In Colorado, they're stricter still. Cause if you use any on-campus equipments like a 3D printer or a laser pen or anything that belongs to the college, you're in the 75 25 crowd.

Oh man. Yeah. Do it in your dorm room. Oof. Yeah. You're there. That 75, 25.

[00:28:01] Ty: Each university has their unique IP agreement. I think NC State has a very favorable one, so it's almost becomes a recruiting component of this.

If you're gonna create something, then how good is the tech transfer office at not just rent-seeking behavior, but actually supporting the entrepreneurial efforts of the students? If you wouldn't mind circling back to novelty. Yes. And how do you know whether or not the invention is novel?

I think you mentioned a patent search, but just maybe you could touch on that originality. You mean it being original?

[00:28:32] Laurence: It would be when I do a search for originality. A patent search is normally your start point and you do a global patent search because again as I mentioned earlier, people do patient engineers.

Lot of engineers do innovative work and get them patented, and if they're approved obviously it's there to see that they don't do anything with it. You might never know that your innovation that you actually want to go to market with belongs to somebody else. But they've never gone to market with them.

So effectively I do global patent searches, I do trademark searches, and then I do FDA searches for American ones. There was an example of a lady's health innovation that came up that wasn't patented and.

Wasn't trademarked in any way. I do copyright searches as well. And then I thought I'm gonna do an FDA search cause this particular process will need FDA approval. And lo and behold, I found it a company in Australia that never applied for a patent. They were doing the identical thing that this person, this company, had on the market without FDA compliance.

However, the process was identical because what I found was they were doing this by mail order and they had an agent here in America and I found the cease and desist letter. Oh. And when we looked at this product and the way the process and everything was, we effectively reversed engineering.

There was no workaround for what could be done for this particular innovation. So potentially to avoid any conflict of interest, the innovators threw her hands up and said, I'm gonna think of something else. Doing the search is not just the patents search, but you just never know.

I always do an FDA search and a CE search because not everybody applies for FDA or, and CE or CE and FDA.

[00:30:29] Jared: Very interesting. I do think, we have, was it 18 minutes left? Maybe we should pivot over a little bit. Talk data science in healthcare and D Cubed Technology. So maybe if you could tell us a bit about your role as, the co-founder, CEO of Okay technologies and its relation to the healthcare industry.

[00:30:46] Laurence: D Cubed Technologies started off as I was one of four partners. I'm now one of two partners. And we did actually start off in the healthcare space to create a program to duplicate electronic healthcare records. Duplicate healthcare records are almost in the US or almost a secret, undesirable secret.

Principally because there is 22 million a year in waste of duplicated healthcare records Wow. Of expenses. There is the famous story took place in Texas of, I think there were 12 Maria Gonzalez's registered in 12 different provider facilities with the same name with the same name, same date of birth, and same social and security birth number.

But ironically, Each Maria Gonzalez with that profile looked different. So every single one was an individual person using the original number one Maria Gonzalez's number. It was a big Medicare fraud, and that's how that came to light. It was the actual name that was used. She was the first one was the real Maria Gonzalez.

And so basically what happens is if they've already been paid by an insurance company or Medicare they have to refund that money because a fraud has taken place and they can't be paid for a fraudulent transaction. So it costs the provider community billions of dollars.

Usually they're small increments, but I know that the Mayo Clinic reported up to two over $200,000 on one record. They had to refund. There's nothing you can do. Your patients had the service gone away. You build the insurance company get paid, and then there's a whoops and there's not a solitary thing you can do about it.

So we set up shop to do that. What happened was The healthcare systems in America for good reasons. HIPAA compliance are paranoid about outside providers coming in to duplicate their EHRs. Obviously, the consequences of breaching HIPAA are severe, not just for. Ourselves, but for the hospital systems in general.

So it was very hard to gain traction with that idea. So what we did was we, I think pivot is the new word. We repositioned ourselves as a company and we now do using machine learning artificial intelligence we do intellectual property tracking. So what we look at is people who have say a copyright.

It's very big in the copyright industry, especially in the music side. Patents, trademarks. You can track somebody a client has a registered trademark and they want it to keep eyes and ears on. Their competition that might be stealing their intellectual property. We can do the tracking on that.

And that's actually a relatively new project. So effectively, I wouldn't say that we've moved out of healthcare completely because there's a lot of healthcare people who've got intellectual property. Yeah. So we could actually accommodate those as well. And therefore we don't have to go into their software systems.

So that's where we're at with D Cubed kept the name the same.

[00:34:10] Jared: Wonderful. Thank you. Just sticking on the side of, healthcare innovation, what do you really feel like the value of, or the importance of, high quality data and healthcare innovation and, what impact do you think it really has on AI-driven solutions for entrepreneurial clinicians and physicians?

[00:34:27] Laurence: I was thinking about this earlier today. Cause I had an idea you were gonna ask me that question. So I would say that, algorithms have been around for centuries and it's been very useful to use them mainstream today. Yesterday and today. I had outside healthcare, I had a project done for a marketing project for a Scandinavian company.

So I don't just deal with healthcare who were launching their product in the US for the first time. And a company that was geographically close to where I'm sat now. They did an artificial intelligence project for me that incorporated and created a marketing campaign that brought a thousand people, or slightly more than a thousand visitors to their exhibition booth at CES on day one.

And this company was completely unknown. So during that process and understanding how it worked, the key and I had to give a list of 24 publications of where this may not social media ones, not the Twitter one. Or the Facebook or anything like that. Just 24 litigation over a period of four years prior to when the last CES show was going to take place.

And so we were back in 2011 and they were scanning through everything and looking for keywords, and it produced a fantastic result. It was a big win. And in healthcare you can have terrific wins. However, algorithms aren't necessarily unique. I found out a lot of them are open source. And you can use an open source algorithm. Very inexpensively. I understand there's like a library of these open source algorithms and you can use them very effectively. However, if they're there in the library, okay, you look at them. Can I use it? No. Okay, let's look at another one. So they're not essentially unique.

There are some custom made ones, don't get me wrong, but. They do a great job providing the data is scrubbed right at the very beginning to be clean. Otherwise you end up with garbage in, garbage out. Absolutely. And therefore the whole process is inaccurate.

[00:36:45] Jared: Yeah, we, Ty and I have seen that as well as, and with us messing around with tools like Chat GPT and stuff like that, if your input is bad, your output is also gonna be equally as

[00:36:54] Laurence: bad.

Exactly. Now there's the opportunity really, and I've spoken to somebody about this is going to Chat GPT input schools. Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. So what does excite me? Actually in the technology world, and this fell on my radar last September. Quantum computing. Absolutely. Yeah. So with AI providing its clean and using quantum computing, instead of taking days, you're looking at minutes.

That's incredible.

[00:37:23] Jared: I've even heard about quantum computing being a threat to like blockchain technology and like encryption data that's out there. The fact that quantum computing can eventually solve these encryptions like really quickly. And it's just not a matter of if, but when it gets strong enough to do so. yeah.

[00:37:41] Laurence: Yeah. I have a connection in Finland. And quantum computing is massive there. January of this year, they started especially in the healthcare world. They started they're in America now. Microsoft has got it. They've just teamed up. It was announced yesterday, I think with Moderna, the pharma Oh, wow.

Company for their not Chat GPT for their quantum computing. Very interesting and that is really, that caught my attention. That I believe is something quantum computing is going to make timelines so short that if you think about, say, an innovation in the pharmaceutical world and using quantum computing to aid the process, it's really gonna bring a lot of products to market.

Yeah, much, much quicker.

[00:38:22] Jared: That actually aligns with the question I had for you as well, which was just talking about, would you say that the healthcare innovation space is more competitive now than it was earlier in your career? And also do you think it's easier and faster to innovate these days, with the tools and resources available to early stage

[00:38:39] Laurence: startups?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I grew up with pen and paper. And when you wanted to find out something, you had to go to the library unless you had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica from the UK. So you had to go to the library and do the research and look through the microphone. Sure. Look through the volumes of books.

And if you couldn't find it in one library, you'd go to a next library, which was bigger, like Central Library in Leeds which is where I was born and raised. And now, today, here we are, 2023. I can look at something while you and I are talking. But there's always downsides to whatever there is.

But innovation is just, it's mainstream now. I believe.

[00:39:17] Ty: Yeah, and especially cloud computing has made it to where if you want to set up an e-commerce site, and it's just happens in minutes now compared to the lengthy time period it used to take to get something set up, get the coding figured out and everything.

All of those connections are well-traveled pathways for yes. A lot of different categories where once before you had to, set up a server, try to figure out where to host it and get your domain name and all of that. It's just so much easier today.

[00:39:44] Laurence: Yeah. I know that I remember some of the startups technology startups that you would read about in the early two thousands where they had the servers in the closet of their parents' home spare bedroom.

There are lots of stories like that. Yeah. Where people start a start up in their bedroom. And by the way, I've got a nice that humming noise that you can hear all night is the server. Yeah.

[00:40:05] Jared: Keeping you up all night. Yeah.

[00:40:07] Laurence: Yeah. But if the stigma of being an innovator has disappeared, It's a much more respected profession, gonna call it industry.

Innovation, say in the last century 1940s, 1950s people were thoughts of being eccentric or being, weird and the innovation today is mainstream. Almost expected.

[00:40:29] Jared: Yeah, sure is. I think we see it in the news. We see it. Anywhere you look essentially, everyone wants to be an innovator, entrepreneur as well.

And I think, on that note, we're pretty close to time here and we have so many more questions to ask you, so I think we may have to have you on again at some point. Okay? Sure.

[00:40:44] Laurence: Yeah. Yeah. In conclusion, yeah. Things are grandchildren, great-grandchildren. We'll say, Hey, do you remember the time when grandpa had to put gas, gasoline in the car to make it go?

That's an analogy that we are living in a transition age, but it's continually transitioning. And I would say specifically in healthcare for the better. If you look at the mortality range, you look at the data, The mortality rates and how people, are not dying.

Most cancers can be cured. Not all, but most, 30 years ago you got cancer. Goodnight. Yeah. Hate to say. Yeah. But today those can, it's, that's

[00:41:21] Jared: innovation. It's incredible and it's happening faster than ever before. Like how you said, we're in one of these transitional periods in human history, essentially. And I think it's really exciting for all of us.

But yeah Laurence, we're coming up on time. We just really thank you for your time today. You're

[00:41:35] Laurence: welcome. Thank you for having me, and I'm happy to come back. If you answer the rest of those questions, you can throw in a few more. We'll sort that out as well.

[00:41:42] Jared: Yeah. Yeah. No, definitely. So yeah, just once again, thank you so much and for everyone that's listening, you're welcome.

You can connect with Laurence on LinkedIn and talk to him about Oakbay, LLC or D Cubed, or work with him on any of his innovation projects that he's got at the moment. And yeah, just you'll, we'll see this on Spotify and YouTube and also TikTok, so find us there. Oh, okay.

[00:42:03] Laurence: I'll have to, I'll have to create an account.

[00:42:07] Jared: We'll tag you in it. And like I said, everybody that join us today, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

[00:42:12] Laurence: And if anybody wants to connect with me on LinkedIn please do and mention that you heard me in this podcast and then I'll know how you found me.

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