Innovation sizzles. It conjures an image of things
modern, high tech, cutting edge, creative, shiny,
and exceedingly useful. It suggests an advance
beyond natural progression and, as health care
continues to be roiled by massive change, it’s being demanded at every level: in hospitals, clinics,
careers, and leadership; from bench science to
clinical trials to day-to-day practice. In science, it
used to be publish or perish; today, the expectation may be more accurately described as innovate or die.
“I
t’s not so much thinking outside of the box
as it is redefining what that box is,” as Jeff
DeGraff, PhD, puts it. He is the dean of innovation at the University of Michigan and runs the
Certified Professional Innovator (CPI) program that
is certified by the University’s College of Engineering. He refers to three defining characteristics that
differentiate innovation from all other forms of
value:
• Innovation possesses a time-based nature; it
happens in the future for which we have no data
now. (Often an uncomfortable zone for people
who rely on data for most decisions.)
• Innovation involves positive deviance, replacing what we expect to see—continuity between
today and tomorrow—with discontinuity that
drives to a future that works.
• Innovation happens horizontally, cutting across
all the boundaries and disciplines of business
practice.
In a recent three-part posting for Psychology Today,
DeGraff looked at “Innovating Innovation Strategy.”
He wrote, “How do you make plans in a world
where plans were meant to be changed? Innovators are adaptors. They’re flexible leaders who run
multiple experiments at once and make adjustments along the way. Rather than create something
completely new, they build onto things that already
exist.”
To be clear: innovation can no longer be considered a luxury or even an option; rather, it is a
demand of every aspect of medicine, patient care,
and research. (It’s every field, really; it’s Innovation Nation or else.) As the population ages and
the incidence of metabolic disorders rises, and as
payers, patients, and governments demand more
effective and less expensive care, innovation presents the way forward. While the need is obvious,
the process requires crystallization, finessing, and
education.
ACC.org/CSWN
According to Merriam-Webster, we define innovation as “a new idea, device, or method” or “the
act or process of introducing new ideas, devices,
or methods.” Fairly straightforward, yet it begs
the question of how innovation differs from other
scientific pursuits, say, plain old research, and why
is it important to better quantify and understand
innovation in our work and in our science?
Innovators Are Made, Not Born
While certain habits and personality traits prove
helpful, as a discipline, innovation can be broken
down into discreet steps and taught. (See Building a Better Innovator.) This was the goal of the
Academy of Innovation Day that directly preceded
the December 2015 Innovation in Cardiovascular
Interventions (ICI) annual conference in Tel Aviv,
Israel. An international conference for innovations
in cardiovascular systems, ICI focuses on the heart,
brain, and peripheral vessels as well as the hightech life science industry and emerging mobile
health solutions.
Introducing the Academy program, ICI CoDirector, Chaim Lotan, MD, called innovation a
subspecialty. “You cannot be an innovator if you
don’t understand the entire process,” he said. To
this end, the Academy of Innovation Day offered
lectures by top industry leaders on different parts
of the innovation process and sought to facilitate
networking among participants.
Dr. Lotan is the Director of the Heart Institute
at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in
Jerusalem, Israel, and the Chief Medical Officer of
InspireMD, a developer of advanced technologies
for vascular intervention. He noted that man