Biomedical Innovation, Surgical Innovation, and Beyond
Michael Gertner, Stanford University
"There's a better way; find it" -Thomas Alva Edison
Some of the most remarkable human advances in the last hundred years have
been health care related. Many of these advances have involved luck…the
right people, the right circumstances. The Biodesign Innovation program
at Stanford attempts to increase the probability that the right people and
the right circumstances come together. There are several major and minor
theses presented throughout this paper. The major thesis is that in today's
medical world, clinical practice continues to become highly focused and at
the same time, technology also is becoming more focused and complex. As
a consequence, the innovation process (the chance that the right people are
present at the right opportunity) is less efficient than it could or should be.
Traditionally, little attention has been given to the process of innovation in
general and specifically to the process within medicine. It is time to look at
the innovation process and how structured programs can be devised to bring
together unmet market needs, talented engineers, and creative individuals from
the various medical surgical specialties to make innovation happen. One of the
first university initiatives to address this issue has been the Biodesign Innovation
program at Stanford University, run by Drs Paul Yock and Joshua Makower as
a component of the multidisciplinary Bio-X center. This paper delineates an
expansion of this program to the surgical disciplines, the Surgical Innovation
program. A further extension is also in the works which expands the underlying
principles of the Biodesign Innovation program to the traditional academic
environment in which research projects, be they dissertation, post-doctoral
projects, or undergraduate projects, are chosen using the needs assessment
approach refined within the Biodesign Innovation program described below.
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