Funding Disruptive Innovation

“Innovation” is a provocative word. For some, it invokes an eye-roll of disdain: “why can’t we just get our work done?” They rhetorically ask.  Sometimes, the way we are doing things is just fine.  Why distract ourselves with new variants of people, processes, or products just for the sake of doing something new? These folks have a point.  Sometimes we just need to do what needs doing. And sometimes the way we’ve been doing it (or even what we’ve been doing) isn’t optimal.  “There must be a better way” says … someone. That someone is the innovator.  The eye-rolls?  The innovator is used to eye-rolls.  And much worse.  Indeed, the innovator has been maligned, undermined, threatened, disciplined, and even fired for thinking about the better way. There’s a good reason for this.  Most innovations fail.  When innovators dream of a better way, and therefore spend time thinking, working on projects that may or may not bear fruit, “wasting” valuable time and money so that they can .. what?  “Improve things!?” Such is the healthy tension, especially in the industry known as “health care.”  Lives are at stake, so we must innovate with extraordinary care, lest we harm people.  There is good reason for this. Or is there? When I was in medical school, I was “spoken to” because I asked questions of a professor who was teaching us tradition that was (even at t...
Source: Docnotes - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs