Angela Gill Nelms on Sustainable Innovation in Healthcare and Technology

 

The Green Impact Report
Quick take: Angela Gill Nelms shares how interdisciplinary approaches and customer-centered innovation can transform healthcare while creating more sustainable outcomes—offering valuable lessons for green building professionals seeking to drive change in their organizations.

Meet Your Fellow Sustainability Champion

Angela Gill Nelms is an accomplished entrepreneur, philanthropist, and board member with a diverse background in SaaS and medical device technology. 

She excels in building teams and companies centered on global corporate culture, strategic planning, and process improvement. 

As the founder and host of the mental wellness podcast, Recovery Advocate Network Coffee and Conversation, she addresses stigma and resource disparities in mental health. Angela has received numerous awards, including Georgia Tech's Academy of Distinguished Alumni Award and recognition among Atlanta's 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies. 

She serves on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and the Recovery Advocate Network mental health board. Outside of work, Angela enjoys hiking, reading, and engaging in activities such as woodturning, blacksmithing, and cycling, having completed six IRONMAN races.

🌱Breaking Ground on Better Building
In this episode, Angela Gill Nelms revolutionizes traditional innovation approaches:

Key Insight #1: Building interdisciplinary teams drives better innovation outcomes

• The Challenge: Siloed expertise creates narrow solutions that fail to address complex problems

• The Solution: Angela pioneered cross-departmental collaboration at Georgia Tech, bringing together electrical, mechanical, computer science, and biomedical engineering students to solve a medical device challenge

• ROI: This approach not only earned her team top honors but transformed how Georgia Tech approaches Capstone projects, creating a new category for interdisciplinary teams

Key Insight #2: Customer-centric design prevents expensive innovation failures

• The Challenge: Medical device innovators often develop "amazing widgets" without consulting end users

• The Solution: Angela's approach involves getting stakeholders into the feedback loop early—whether doctors, patients, or facility managers

• ROI: This methodology dramatically reduces waste, shortens development cycles, and creates solutions people actually want to use

Key Insight #3: Healthcare environments can learn from children's hospitals to create more healing spaces

• The Challenge: Traditional medical facilities often feel sterile, institutional, and anxiety-inducing

• The Solution: Angela suggests modeling adult healthcare spaces after modern children's hospitals with natural light, bright colors, and engaging environments

• ROI: These design changes not only improve patient outcomes through reduced stress but can speed recovery time, shortening stays and reducing resource consumption

Sustainable Soundbite
"I think part of it is being able to tell better stories about the successes we've had and why those successes matter… and also speaking with partners across different industries to ask, 'okay, what really matters to you and what have you nailed and how can we use that to become creative?'" – Angela Gill Nelms

Your Green Building Action Plan
Transform your next project with these steps:

1. This Week: Identify a challenge in your organization where cross-discipline collaboration could create more sustainable solutions. Invite unconventional stakeholders to your next planning meeting.

2. This Quarter: Implement Angela's customer-centric approach by creating a feedback mechanism for building end-users to evaluate your sustainability initiatives before full implementation.

3. This Year: Explore how healthcare design principles might inform your green building projects, particularly focusing on environments that promote wellbeing alongside sustainability.

Connect & Learn More

• 🌿 Connect with Angela Gill Nelms: LinkedIn

• 🗒️ Read the transcript here

• 📧 Email Angela: [email protected]

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