Books

Check out our list of recommended books for budding healthcare / healthtech innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

Ries builds on his experience of his first failed startup, Catalyst Recruiting and his second employer There, Inc. which failed an important and expensive product launch. He imparts his knowledge about the areas vital to a business’ survival. The Lean Startup became #2 on New York Times Best Seller upon its debut in 2011.

The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, author of business classic The Innovator’s Dilemma, directs his theories towards the future disruption of healthcare. Here he provides a fascinating analysis of the strategies that will improve healthcare and make it affordable.

The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right

In this book surgeon, columnist and author Atul Gawande deals with how health professionals face increasing complexity in their work, making medical error an everyday occurrence. He draws from the experiences of pilots and construction workers and proposes that to improve healthcare and outcomes experts must have the humility to concede that they need help.

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company: 1

To many tech entrepreneurs this is the Startup Bible. A step-by-step guide to putting the Customer Development process to work and building a successful, scalable and profitable startup.

Creative Destruction of Medicine

A great introduction to how digital technologies are being applied to improve medical care, increasing access and decreasing cost. Topol argues that radical innovation and the democratisation of medicine will shake up medicine like nothing before and that ‘customers’ must drive this change.

The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup

Harvard Business School Professor Noam Wasserman captures the high stakes decisions that entrepreneurs face every day, revealing common pitfalls and how to avoid them and mapping out the route to creating a world-beating company from scratch.

Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future

Celebrated entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel argues that creating new things such as breakthrough technologies is distinct from copying existing things, and the key to creating huge value not only for yourself and your investors, but for the world as a whole.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business + Website (Startup Revolution)

Being a CEO is an incredibly complex job at any company, but can be particularly challenging at a startup. This book contains valuable insights into the day-to-day requirements of a startup CEO and pitfalls to avoid, from someone who has been there and done it.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz venture fund and one of Silicon Valley’s most experienced and respected entrepreneurs offers advice on building and running a startup, based on the extreme ups and downs of his own experiences and those of the many entrepreneurs he has worked with.

Patient Will See You Now

In this follow up to The Creative Destruction of Medicine Cardiologist Dr. Eric Topol examines what he calls medicine’s “Gutenberg Moment”. He predicts that new technologies will democratise medicine, with patients controlling their own data, mobile phones becoming a ‘lab in our pocket’ and computers replacing physicians for many diagnostic tasks.

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

A classic book detailing how entrepreneurs must navigate their companies through and beyond the inevitable lull that lies beyond the early adopters, if they are to reach mass audiences and widespread success.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

In this short 200 page book published in 2013, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan explore the common habit amongst high achievers. In an information overload and multitasking culture, they will convince you why being focused on one thing rather than trying to multitask is in fact the secret to getting further and getting more done quicker.