In health care, possibly more than other industries, we consider ourselves so expert that innovation is generally expected to come from within - and deep within at that. Can We Innovate Ourselves Out of Recession published July 1, 2009 in the Knowledge@Wharton column on Forbes. Com examines a different approach taken by industry. It describes the effective use of external innovation networks to generate solutions to technical problems in the non health care world. It occurred to me that health care leaders might want to consider how to harness fresh ideas from smart people outside our somewhat insular industry.
Power of the Connection
This blog has previously commented on the potential power of non-insider innovation that might be obtained by leveraging social networks (Crowdsourcing as a Health Care Redesign Tool), through the placement of leaders from the outside (Could Outsiders Represent and Inside Track for Health Care Leaders), and by relying heavily on consumer specifications and requirements (What Can Tata Motors Teach Health Care Leaders). But the concept of expert innovation networks goes beyond these occasional and informal approaches to get "newthink" into organizations. The authors suggest that:
"...given today's fast-paced global marketplace and limited resources for research and development, companies often struggle simply to survive, let alone innovate... rather than going back to the drawing board, companies should go outside their walls and tap into "innovation networks."
One of the sources for this piece, a senior fellow at the Mack Center for Technological Innovation, described it thusly:
If you look at most organizations, they're focused on what is their intellectual IQ," Huston said. "What we're talking about is moving from inventing to connecting."
Six Degrees of Separation?
So what do innovation networks look like and do they actually work? They span a variety of arrangements among multiple partners outside the firm's own industry or market that reciprocally provide innovative inputs as part of their core collaborative arrangement. According to this article, Proctor & Gamble, the successful consumer products company, increased its innovation output by nearly 2/3 by involving:
"...hundreds of outside partners in research and development. The strategy presumed that for every scientist at P&G, there were at least 200 outside the company who could do similar work. With that mindset, the company's intellectual assets became not just "our know-how" but also "who we knew."
Another example cited in the article involves how Exxon found a solution to the problem of cleaning up spilled oil trapped below the surface of Prince William Sound after the Valdez disaster by offering a "challenge award" to a large network of non-oil industry resources. The answer that had stumped oil engineers for 20 years came from a construction engineer who applied his experience working with cement to the problem of creating a pumpable liquid out of frozen oil.
InnoCentive, a Waltham MA solutions company has made a business of consolidating mostly individuals and some companies into a virtual solutions network of 175,000 resources for its clients. In successfully solving client problems, it has learned that:
"... the background of the solver who solved the problem" was "no less than six disciplines away" from the subject area in which the problem emerged. "What that means is, if all the Stanford Ph.D.s in your chemistry lab could have solved the problem, they would have solved it already."
Meaning that many solutions didn't even remotely come from the experts we usually expect to generate them. So try this as a rough translation into our lingo: "...if all the smart doctors and health care leaders in our organizations could solve all of our problems, they would have done so already."
I don't know how applicable this is to health care. But something tells me that we are accustomed to looking inside for what frequently turn out to be inadequate (or certainly less than innovative) fixes to health care operations inefficiencies, technologic limitations, and patient service failures. Perhaps a few degrees of separation and a formal network of contributors would be a good thing.
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