Nick Dougherty ’07, CEO and co-founder of Verbal Applications, spoke to James Mills’s Microeconomics class on Monday about launching a business focused on social change. The idea for Nick’s company, which provides a cloud-based communication platform improving patient care, grew from a senior design project at Boston University’s College of Engineering. The project goal was to create an app for someone who had suffered a stroke. After shadowing nurses in hospitals, Nick and his two co-founders designed an app to help patients with speech issues communicate with their caregivers.
Nick demonstrated the app with students, and he stressed how important collaboration is to business endeavors. “Competition is simply making something a little bit better than your competitor,” said Nick, “but collaboration fuels innovation.”
Nick and his partners quit their jobs last summer to focus full-time on Verbal Applications. Through their research, they also learned the inefficiencies of the hospital call button system; they are now working to expand the app into a full hospital communication system. Nick will give a TEDxNortheastern talk in January.
