Special Advisor on Health
David Karshmer
David Karshmer is a creative leader with a track record in design and business innovation. Working with small startups to Fortune 500 companies, David has established his ability to lead creative teams in the practical steps that define achievable and measurable innovation.
For the last ten years David has focused his consulting practice on helping companies identify and organize responses to business opportunities. A great deal of this work has been in the health and healthcare spaces. More importantly, this work has focused on an observed and holistic understanding of consumers that allows a richer and more complete response to their stated and latent needs.
David founded and led the Healthcare practice at IDEO for seven years. During this period he developed the tools and practices that helped IDEO teams work with clients on projects that ranged from technologically focused initiatives to multidisciplinary corporate strategy development. Beginning with a small portfolio of projects inside IDEO, he grew the Healthcare practice to a point at which it represented a significant portion of the IDEO’s revenues, and was a highly visible player in healthcare innovation.
As a trained engineer and artist, he has found visual modes of discovery and communication to be key elements in his work. Video ethnography, visual prototyping, and storyboarding are tools that he has relied on to understand the present, and communicate the future. An effective design leader, he has a willingness to embrace and work through uncertainty to more promising endpoints. This characteristic has also been a keystone to his practice and training as an artist at University College London.
David’s work is balanced by his experience as an entrepreneur. Working inside startups like the highly successful Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, he has seen the challenges and opportunities that define the success or failure of a new initiative. As an entrepreneur in residence at the Mayfield Fund, David refined his ability to both see the strategic opportunities represented by new companies as well as the operational frameworks necessary to make them viable.
David has presented at Venture Capital and Healthcare Industry meetings on subjects ranging from consumer’s as designers, to systems for innovation. He continues to work in healthcare, with an increasing engagement in initiatives focused on health. David has worked with a wide range of companies including: Grundfos; NovoNordisk; J&J; PepsiCo; Innovation Center Denmark; the Santa Fe Innovation Park initiative; the London Science Museum; First Hand Experience, a London based user research consultancy; 1747 Inc, an online clinical trials company; Atrionix; ePatients; Planet-Well; Boston Scientific; Medtronic; Advanced Tissue Sciences; 3M Healthcare; Inhale; Eli Lilly; IVAC; Abbott Laboratories; Baxter Healthcare; Health Hero Network; Heartstream; Pfizer; Applied Immune Systems; ATL; Heartstream; Nellcor; Glaxo-Wellcome.
David holds an MFA degree from University College London, and a B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of California at San Diego.
