The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

The world has many problems, but few solutions—too few good, effective, *scalable* solutions. MIT Solve seeks to change this. Solve, “a community of cross-sector leaders devoted to identifying and supporting solutions to actionable challenges through open innovation,” is helmed by Executive Director Alex Amouyel, who recently popped over to our Boston studio for a chat with Gaurav Rohatgi, Co-Lead of EPAM Continuum’s Life Sciences Vertical. Amouyel explains that Solve is a “marketplace for social impact innovation,” to which Rohatgi asks: *Why* is such a marketplace necessary? In this free-flowing conversation, Amouyel talks about many topics: How her biochemistry background helps her communicate with her STEM-based network, a Solver team's cool childhood development milestones app, and the profound importance of optimism in social innovation. She also provides important details about the Challenge Design Workshop we’re co-hosting with Solve, in our Boston studio, on Tuesday, January 28, at 3 p.m. We hope you enjoy this dialogue and invite you to join us for the workshop—and perhaps a chance to have your *own* conversation with Amouyel.

Pull up a seat, sit down, and prepare to devour the first course of *Why Now,* a production of EPAM Continuum’s Resonance Test podcast. *Why Now,* which is hosted by our Megan Welker, explores the relationship between cultural trends and disruptive innovations. Our first topic: the rise of alternative proteins. You can’t go out for a meal today without bumping into Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods somewhere on the menu. Why are meat-based meats seeing all this competition? To dig into the context, we asked Ayr Muir, Founder and CEO of Clover Food Lab, the Boston-based vegetarian food chain that’s been hawking Impossible meatball sandwiches since 2017: Why Now? Muir was refreshingly open in his responses. “We're in the food industry, and I think it's the most dishonest industry,” he said, adding that “It's a space where there's a lot of opportunity for creating real relationships. I think you have to start with trust to do that.” In the process, we learned what goes into Impossible meatballs and what they do for his business, the value of publicizing one’s mistakes, and the ways in which our food choices today are really about “voting for a certain future.” Curious to learn more? Listen to *Why Now*—now. Host: Megan Welker Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon Restaurants & Retail Vertical Lead: Buck Sleeper

What happens when a renowned futurist joins EPAM Continuum? Here’s what happens: things get *interesting.* You feel this immediately by listening to a just-recorded conversation between our new colleague, David Rose—author of *Enchanted Objects,* former MIT Media Lab savant and Warby Parkerite—and our less-new but equally articulate colleague, Toby Bottorf. What’s special about Rose? It’s not just his informed outlook on augmented reality (“The new term is ‘spatial computing,’”) or his colorful experiences in tech and business. Yes, Rose casually deploys a variety of interesting words in conversation—“the topology of your face,” “pupillary distance,” “e-com funnel,” “a Louis XV gold sapphire brooch,” “vomiting rainbows on the plane of your face” and “pre-attentive processing”—but that’s not it either. *It* is the multiple possibilities Rose’s optimistic imagination brings to our work. “I tend to think that there are more journalists, whistle-blowers, and people who are willing to be alarmist in the world, rather than people who are trying to create the desirable future states,” he says. “And so I’d like to focus on the positive valence stuff.” We’re with him! Listen up, and you just might be, too. Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Dr. Bryan Vartabedian is a pediatric gastroenterologist, or a “[g]astroenterologist to small people,” as he describes his specialization on his popular Twitter profile. Pediatrics is a complicated job, he explains, in the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* In an intense conversation with our Jonathon Swersey, Dr. Vartabedian says: “We really serve two masters: we are morally and ethically obligated to that child who’s under our care, while at the same time we have an obligation to the surrogate or the parent who’s bringing that child in.” Listen in and you’ll hear him talk about the extreme metricization of patient experience: “As we strive to get those [patient satisfaction] numbers to link with Medicare reimbursement, there’s kind of this pressure to kind of operationalize human encounters, which is a little bit icky” and how “being a pain at times is part of the job of the parent looking after” a sick child. This honest and informed conversation will leave you with a strong sense of where healthcare is heading. “As medicine becomes more precise and more predictive and preemptive, the amount of data that’s emanating from us, via these genomic studies or imaging or what have you, is going to become greater and greater,” says Dr. Vartabedian. “And I think our role as physicians is going to be to act as a mediator or moderator of all these incoming inputs.” Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In May 2015, Alan Rusbridger stepped down as the editor of *The Guardian.* He had managed, over the course of 20 years, to transform the British paper into a digital phenomenon—a truly global source of news. His book, *Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now,* details that transformation. In a recent *Resonance Test* conversation, Rusbridger relates how it feels to *not* to report on Brexit Era U.K. politics (“I’m really rather relieved not to have anything to do with it”) and talks about the stress involved in digitizing one’s business: “Suddenly you say to your staff: ‘By the way, we want you to update things every five minutes, every ten minutes. We want you to do it in video and audio as well as text. We want you to be on social media. We might want you to do live events as well. And by the way, you can’t go home at 9:00 because the story keeps updating till midnight...” Listen closely, and you’ll learn about the uncertainly of life during a digital revolution, the dangers of deepfakes, the challenges of writing a business memoir, and even the extent of Rusbridger’s non-Chopin piano repertoire: “Given enough drink, I will sit and play show tunes all evening—but that doesn’t happen very often.”

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is about to turn 150. But hitting that big round anniversary doesn’t mean it’s a fossilized cultural organization. Just the opposite. The MFA attitude is young, vital, experimental. We learned this when we partnered with this storied institution to redesign their membership program. In this episode of *The Resonance Test,* Brandon Tirrell, our Associate Director of Innovation Consulting, talks about the project with Katie Getchell, Chief Brand Officer and Deputy Director at the MFA, and Julia Propp, Director of Membership. What happened when we showed up slinging human-centered design? Getchell says she and Propp were surprised in that “everybody around the table kind of lit up at the idea. It wasn’t as hard as maybe we might have feared.” Listen to Getchell and Propp talk about how the MFA did some bold, improvisational prototyping all on their own! This story proves than a venerable-yet-open-minded org can learn new kinds of flexibility. Or as Propp puts it: “Being comfortable with ambiguity was a muscle that we had to learn how to flex.” Hosts: Brandon Tirrell and Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

How about that John Brownstein, PhD, eh? The Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, digital epidemiologist, Canadian, fan of hot peppers and the cinema of Wes Anderson, Brownstein recently skated over to EPAM Continuum’s Boston studio for a chat. The conversation ranged all over the ice, from voice computing (“We think that voice, especially for patients, whether in the home or the hospital… it’s very empowering”), to digital phenotypes, to population health (“There’s a whole field of disease forecasting that’s taking its lessons from weather forecasting”). Tune in for an informative, and fun, face-off.

Nick Dougherty is back! The Managing Director of MassChallenge HealthTech has returned to *The Resonance Test* to report on how his startups and champions have been working together. Since we last spoke with Dougherty, his program changed names—it was originally called Pulse@MassChallenge—and has created some great outcomes in digital health. MassChallenge HealthTech has shepherded approximately 90 companies through the program, and in the process created more than 270 partnerships. The impact is real: improvements to millions of patient lives, increases in revenue and funding for startups, increases in jobs. Always glad when an innovative program gets a clean bill of health. Listen and learn about what makes a good partnership, Gen Z entrepreneurship, and the role of data at MassChallenge HealthTech. Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Dr. Eric Topol isn’t playing around. The author of *Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again* wants physicians to become activists—and to use technology to transform medicine. “That’s where we need to see the breakout. Doctors leading this charge, getting organized, and saying: ‘We’re not going to take it anymore and we’re demanding time with our patients!’” Artificial intelligence and machine learning, he says, can help us turn things around. However, adds Dr. Topol, this is far from a consensus opinion. “I think the idea that technology could enhance humanity in medicine is alien in this country.” In a spirited discussion with our own Jonathon Swersey, the good doctor touches on “the gift of time,” the role of patients and caregivers in the AI revolution, and how data should figure in healthcare’s future (“Right now, we have only fragments of people’s data about their health. Whereas we should have every part of their data from when they were in the womb up to the present moment”). We even learn, from this dialogue, which book we should read after finishing *Deep Medicine*. Tune in and download the latest chapter in the story of digital health.

“Human beings are notorious for wanting multiple conflicting things,” says Megan Burns, setting the tone of this episode of *The Resonance Test*: thoughtful, empathic, honest. One of the founding mothers of experience management, Burns honed her thinking at Forrester Research, producing more than 75 reports. Today Burns is the CEO of Experience Enterprises, but she hasn’t strayed a millimeter from the nuances of CX. “Is making it easy for someone who is trying to curb their spending habits to buy $400 worth of shoes at 3:00 in the morning from their bed from their phone… is that really meeting the customer’s ‘needs’? Probably not.” We’re thrilled to have Megan Burns Experience on the podcast. In this winning chinwag with our Toby Bottorf (no CX slouch himself,) these two parse the “E”s with warmth and intelligence. Of course, one listen won’t probably be enough—“Our conscious brains only notice about 40 pieces of the 11 million pieces of information we take in at any moment,” says Burns—but give it a shot. You can always re-experience it by hitting the play button. Host: Pete Chapin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon