Innovation

"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought." - A. Szent-Gyorgyi.

Medical innovation struggles with an odd paradox. Those who understand medicine the best - health care providers, physicians, nurses, therapists - tend to be risk-averse late adopters. We shy away from innovation. We do things "because that's the way they've been done." The training is so long that by the time we're done, we have trouble thinking outside the box. There's a reason for this. We don't want to "experiment" on our patients. We worry that deviation from a standard of care will cause patient harm or invite lawsuits. We self-select into this career because we're risk averse; we want a stable job with a defined path to get there.

Innovators, inventors, and designers, however, must think outside the box. They break out of the norm, find creative solutions, and reframe problems in different lights. They don't mind trying and failing. In fact, failure is the iterative process by which they improve their approach to problems. My friends who are entrepreneurs think totally different than me and are willing to accept a much larger measure of risk. They carve out their own path in the world, and when things deviate from the expected, they get excited.

In order for us to push the boundaries of medical innovation, we need to weld these two approaches to problem solving. Whether it is training one group to think like the other or building multidisciplinary teams, I think the future lies in the medical innovator who understands what it's like to be a doctor but sees things like an inventor.