Finding an appropriate business model is situational and may evolve as you engage with the user community. You could start by working in public with an open source license [1]. Your initial focus is customer discovery and building a community of stakeholders willing to invest their time and accepting the adoption risk. Once you have advocates, they may have suggestions for an appropriate business model. For example, the existing non-profit may decide to apply for grants, keeping the work open source and acting as the fiscal sponsor for the project via open collective [2] supporting a paid position. In my experience, getting caught up on recapturing early investment, being concerned about secrecy / proprietary value, or being worried about a competitor are often not the best use of mental energy early on. Conversely, sharing more about your space and ideas may win you collaborators and potential customers you didn't anticipate. Alas, none of this advice may apply, the right approach is specific to a particular opportunity. Good luck & have fun.
Sid, Thank you for funding Arden Bio. Rheumatology patients and their clinicians are often left to throwing darts from afar, in series and often with significant & permanent function loss with each dart. Moreover, proper care of refractory rare diseases is not something that insurance funds: my otherwise excellent coverage expressly denies "investigatory" treatments, for example. As a small fiber neuropathic vasculitus patient with secondary Sjögren's I really look forward to progress in this field, it cannot happen soon enough. Best of luck in your own care and profile. - Clark
Heath Brothers' treatise, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, describes three legs to facilitating a change: clear vision, sufficient motivation, and concrete first steps.
The title of this blog post hints at an important topic. However, I think even a single page summary or graphic from Switch may be more actionable. I don't love Switch's elephant analogy but it's good enough. It helped me with blind spots in my proposals.
Democracy is successful when it creates the business-regulatory environment and marketplace that let the private sector advance human welfare as well as technology.
After birth, when new parents are sleep deprived, is a uniquely stressful time when parents are bombarded with information. Advice on the Internet is prolific and often wrong, raising anxiety without providing needed context-sensitive guidance. It looks like this program was providing trustworthy materials and outreach to reduce infant death.
Dissemination takes work. Materials in the right languages are needed. Finding the minimum necessary detail and visuals help. Delivery to new parents has to be done when they need the information, else they won't be receptive or remember. Then you need to get these materials into the birthing centers, to midwifes and nurses, etc. An evaluation component is also helpful to see if the approach can be improved, etc. Having this done in a repeatable way is important, every day there are new parents.
I don't see the price tag for this, but a few million dollars isn't all that much given the complexity of the dissemination challenge. It's probably a program but likely not an entire department. Curating knowledge and getting it to right people's attention at the right time is hard work. Did you see the materials they produce/disseminate?
If you were going to put a value on an infant's life for purposes of, say, settling a lawsuit, $10 million wouldn't be unreasonable. Think of that infant's earnings over their entire life, plus the loss to the parents. So the program would only need to save one or a handful of infant lives a year to be worth the cost, at least from an actuarial perspective. Eliminating the program is incredibly wasteful.
I think the worse-is-better philosophy is not well encapsulated with the 4 priorities given. Perhaps it is 4 completely different priorities. Here's a strawman.
1. Minimal -- the design and implementation must be the smallest as possible,
especially the scope (which should be deliberately "incomplete")
2. Timely -- the implementation must be delivered as soon as feasible, even if it comes before the design (get it working first, then figure out why)
3. Relevant -- the design and implementation must address important, unmet need, eschewing needs that are not urgent at the time (you can iterate or supplement)
4. Usable -- the implementation must be integrated with the existing, working and stable infrastructure (even if that integration causes design compromises)
The other dimensions, simplicity, correctness, consistency, and completeness are very nice to have, but they are not the primary drivers of this philosophy.
Thank you @jaboutboul. I appreciate that Linux works so well on Azure.
A substantial problem for the Linux ecosystem on Azure is that Azure Files is not POSIX compliant. With Container Apps, ephemeral storage is POSIX compliant. However, if you mount a persistent Azure Files file system and use it directly, some applications break. One workaround is to use rsync in the background to replicate data from ephemeral to Azure Files, but we can lose data this way (and ephemeral storage is limited to 8 GiB).
It'd also be nice if "Consumption Only" container apps would have more than 4GB of memory. It's so nice to use these.
My new bosh dishwasher does clean better and is quieter compared to prior bosh, that had to be replaced at the 7 year mark. This one is far more plastic and I expect it to last only 3-5 years.
Except that the one that lasts for 5 years will have 3 maintenance breakdowns during that time, where the appliance is unusable for 3-7 weeks while the service tech goes back and forth replacing components. I'd rather be stuck with the 20 old machine that has a few breakdowns but with simpler parts that could fit in the truck.
There is a business opportunity here, like Framework (with open specs), but for Induction cooktops, refrigerators, dishwashers, etc.
[1] https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public [2] https://opencollective.com/become-a-host