Oliver Bernath’s lecture ‘How do you make a good idea successful?’ (4^th February) was a candid look at the entrepreneurial spirit and how to capture it. Based on his own experiences, some positive and some negative, Oliver showed that being a successful innovator has much less to do with the idea, and more to do with not falling into some pretty simple traps. Firstly, you need to be confident in the Unique Selling Point of your product. It needs to be sustainable and you need to be able to describe it in one sentence. Secondly, you need to make sure you have identified your market. Will the product reach an audience? Who is that audience? How is that audience changing? Thirdly, you need to make sure that the product will make you money. This means creating an efficient team around you, keeping cash available during funding shortfalls and staying lean.

But what struck me the most was how making a good idea successful seems to depend a lot on you as a person. Key to the process is whether you can take risks. Can you put your own weight behind the idea, take a gamble on it and commit to seeing it through? Are you the sort of person that knows when to quit on an idea that is failing? Are you humble enough to not bluff your way through a funding pitch? Are you able to motivate the people around you, nudging them in a certain direction?

These are not simple things, they cannot really be learnt nor taught, and they are likely to be innate in some people more than others. Talking with some medical students after the lecture, they were, rightly, in awe of Oliver’s personal trajectory – consultant neurologist, entrepreneur, management consultant. ‘At Medical School, we are taught to just think in a linear fashion – stay on a straight and narrow path.’

It seems to me then, that any discussion of how to turn a good idea into a successful innovation cannot be separate from a discussion of how to turn a good idea person, into a successful innovator. If our education system is limited in this way, then it needs to be addressed so that in addition to producing good innovations we are producing good innovators.

What makes a good Medical Innovation?

In his lecture, “what makes a good medical innovation?’ (28^th January 2008) Prof Lionel Tarassenko noted that several important ingredients are required.  The organization developing the new technology must remain nimble, and it must find the right partners in the early stages.  But also, drawing on fascinating examples of signal processing techniques applied to the continuous monitoring of the vital signs of patients in Intensive Care Units and in patients with long-term conditions, he illustrated that good ideas should come about through interdisciplinary collaboration between different areas of expertise.

In the cases that he used, the disciplines of medicine and electrical engineering were combined in perfect harmony.  Continuous monitoring allows for a greater predictive capacity in identifying those patients with imminent and worsening clinical conditions.  But also it overcomes the strangely adaptive behaviour of nursing staff to the many repeated false alarms that the existing monitoring devices were known for, namely to ignore them.

It seems that the future holds exciting innovations in many areas that combine medicine with other disciplines.  In the area of telemedicine, technologies such as teleSurgery can enable access to needed expertise in developed countries and help avoid a brain drain.  In the area of nanotechnology, new nanomedicines could completely displace certain classes of drugs and change the ways diseases like HIV, malaria and TB are treated.  In the area of eLearning technologies, capacity building and collaboration with international institutions can occur in real-time.  In the area of social networking, Web 2.0 and wiki will mean that health professionals and patients in developing countries can effectively network with each other and with the industrialized world, participating in knowledge development.  Finally, open access technologies are revolutionizing and democratizing medical publishing resulting in a paradigm shift in why and how we publish scientific research.

When researchers from different backgrounds talk to each other and cross-fertilize their work, creative and applied ideas emerge.  I wonder which will be the next inter-disciplinary collaboration to emerge as the front-runner in medicine.  Quantum physics?  Artificial intelligence?  Complex Adaptive systems?

It may or may not be apparent, but the Medical Innovation lecture series was devised to serve this function.  By bringing together students, researchers, academics, practitioners and managers to debate the cross-cutting issue of innovation, it is hoped that some cross-fertilization will emerge, and with that new ideas for future collaboration and indeed innovation.