Partnering for Cures 2015 brought together innovative ideas and disruptive thinkers to transform the medical research system with insights such as:

1. When trying to motivate people, remember that you can’t always herd cats, but you can move their food.
2. There is no substitute for patient input – it’s very different to hear from patients directly than it is to hear from translators trying to speak on their behalf.
3. Medicine should be at least as good as Netflix at analyzing data for the benefit of consumers.
4. Translate emotion into data to create powerful evidence.
5. The value of “optimal distance” in solving difficult problems cannot be ignored. The smartest people probably don’t work for you and may come from another field entirely.
6. Patients are already demanding their data – that ship has sailed. But they don’t just want the data, they want to be able to do something with the data.
7. It’s hard for people to talk about failure, but critical to advancing learning.
8. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build a new model that makes the old one obsolete.
9. We charge forward until we hit a wall. Then we break the wall. And if we can’t, we scale the wall. Or build a door. Whatever it takes.
10. Success is never final.