For healthcare professionals, it is important to understand the difference between a good idea and a business opportunity. Innovation is crucial to the future of health care - especially with trends such as personal medicine and retail and consumer-driven healthcare driving fundamental changes in the value chain. Unfortunately, many of today's budding innovations never make it to market. Instead, they're sidetracked by the pressures of patient care and practice management or sabotaged by legal, financial and marketing issues. Now, more of these good ideas can succeed thanks to powerhouse new book, written expressly for physicians and healthcare professionals, by Luis Pareras, MD, PhD, MBA. This book explains how to nurture that entrepreneurial spirit and apply proven business principles to fast-track new ideas into valuable real-world devices and other medical breakthroughs. Clearing the obstacles to innovation, this unique book is an investment that will repay "physician-entrepreneurs" many, many times over with guidance for researching the competitive landscape, protecting intellectual property, developing the right business and marketing plans, getting funding and going to market. Topics include practical strategies on how to: * Motivate entrepreneurial thinking * Understand the difference between a good idea and an opportunity * Protect your intellectual property * Evaluate the real-world potential for a new innovation, device or product * Create a stellar business plan that fast-tracks progress * Identify the right investors and raise capital - the rules of the game * Make the right marketing and distribution decisions * Leverage "MBA skills" - deal-making, valuation, negotiation, strategy, communication and more ...