HIRANI’s Mentoring Programme is designed to do more than connect innovators with experienced mentors. It creates opportunities for practical, targeted conversations that help founders and innovation teams test assumptions, work through barriers and think more clearly about adoption, commercialisation and scale.
As part of the programme, HIRANI recently hosted a webinar with Hassan Chaudhury, focused on what it takes to move health innovation beyond promising ideas and towards adoption at scale. One of the strongest messages from the session was the importance of understanding genuine demand.
“Build it and they will come. It’s a film, not a strategy.”
Hassan challenged innovators to distinguish between “push” and “pull” which identifies a challenge that organisations recognise and are willing to address. As he explained, demand cannot be manufactured. The task for innovators is to understand where that demand already exists and how their product or service can respond to it.
The session also explored four recurring themes in health innovation: aligning users and other stakeholders, reducing unnecessary rework, understanding market pull and designing for adoptability. In healthcare especially, innovation needs to fit real workflows and be used consistently enough to be embedded.
A key strength of the HIRANI Mentoring Programme is the opportunity to continue these conversations beyond the webinars. Hassan offered dedicated open slots for innovators to discuss their own ideas, challenges and routes to adoption. These sessions provide an opportunity to move from general principles to the realities facing innovators, whether that relates to product-market fit, scaling, adoption or navigating health and care systems. (email info@hira-ni.com for more information) That practical access to experience is central to the programme and creates trusted spaces where innovators can ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions and turn mentoring conversations into meaningful innovation progress.
