About Prinnovo
Prinnovo partners with Community Health Systems to unlock hidden value, generating financial returns and accelerating innovation through its embedded team of Health Venture Office entrepreneurs and venture experts.
The idea of a “Health Venture Office” was first developed at Cone Health, a community health system located in Greensboro, NC.
In 2016, Prinnovo’s founder Mark Rainosek and Jay Brennan, with dozens of years of experience in entrepreneurialism, mergers and acquisitions, startup investing, and scaling businesses, engaged Greg Hewitt, Executive Director of Innovation at Cone Health, around how to shorten the technology adoption curve while making innovation profitable. The goal was to transform its innovation department from a loss leader to a revenue generator.
Out of this came the “Health Venture Office” model, an innovative approach developed with a community health system for community health systems to enhance margins and generate long-term financial gains.
The initial concept was to have a health system identify their unmet needs and strategic goals, then have Prinnovo identify potential startup partners that could address those needs or enable those strategies. This approach would allow the health system to more quickly and efficiently identify, co-create and validate solutions that addressed their needs while also capturing a portion of the financial upside created by the two parties working together.
For this model to work, Prinnovo had to prove that it could:
- LOCATE the best potential partners that were working on solutions to the identified need
- NEGOTIATE win-win deals that would allow Cone Health to capture equity in the startup partner in exchange for Cone Health’s efforts in the work
- ACCELERATE the co-creation, piloting and validation of the solution within Cone Health
Prinnovo began to work inside the Cone Health organization to understand how to develop these opportunities and implement them in Cone Health’s operations. This work helped Cone Health become more innovative and both work more effectively with innovation partners to create validated solutions and help the startup partner scale the solution in the market.
Cone Health saw significant value in this work and decided to institutionalize the model within Cone Health as Cone Health Ventures (CHV), the first Health Venture Office™. CHV was staffed by a team of Prinnovo employees that were embedded within the Cone Health operation. This team supported innovation partnership development and created a portfolio of equity holdings now worth tens of millions of dollars.
Over the past five years, which included two plus years of Covid, CHV has successfully generated a large portfolio of equity holdings worth millions of dollars of return to Cone Health.
Based on this success, Prinnovo has now taken the Health Venture Office model to several other community health systems across the country, creating a collaborative network of Health Venture Offices.
Interested in learning more? Contact us and a Prinnovo member will reach out to you.
Our Expertise
Prinnovo developed the Health Venture Office specifically for community health systems that desire to become more innovative. We do this by first investing hidden value and generating greater financial returns without putting significant amounts of capital at risk.
Prinnovo has demonstrated that community health systems can gain access to the most innovative companies and capture significant operational and financial returns with less risk by investing the health system’s hidden value into innovative companies.
A Health Venture Office is an embedded, dedicated team of entrepreneurs and venture experts hired and managed by Prinnovo to identify and invest your hidden value, which generates significant financial returns and advances your mission by accelerating innovation.
Prinnovo identifies innovation partners, joint venture and new venture opportunities that address your key needs, negotiates arrangements that invest your hidden value, and facilitates the internal innovation process to accelerate validation and adoption of the most innovative solutions.
Prinnovo creates a portfolio that will both drive millions of dollars of additional near-term margin within your operation and generate significant long-term equity returns as these portfolio companies are acquired in the market.