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You know, it is often said that the greatest risk inside any organisation
is institutional blindness, is when too many merchant bankers have been with too
many other merchant bankers.
Or when too many people from the Pentagon play too many war
games
with other people from the Pentagon. We need oxygen
and that's where actually innovation comes from. In fact, I'm really interested
in where we get our best ideas from.
I've been doing a global survey on this, looking at
the answers that, 15 thousand Senior Executives, CEO's and Chairmen
of large companies have been saying about this issue. I'm interested where you get
your best
ideas from. I'm not just talking about an idea that later becomes an innovation.
But i'm talking about an idea to unblock one of the great challenges that we've
been hearing about today.
Challenges inside your organisations. They might be just an idea to stop
the churn of some of your innovators inside an existing team. Put your hands up you get
your best ideas in meetings at work.
Put your hands up if you get your best ideas in the shower.
That's really interesting: that's one of the most popular ones globally.
Put your hands up if it comes in the bath,
never in the shower but in the bath...OK 1 or 2. Put your hands up if it comes
at night, so often at night,
that you have to go to sleep with a piece a paper by your bed
and a pen, which you'll write in darkness in case you wake up this person who's sleeping
next to you but nevertheless, you write in the night. Put your hands up if you get ideas
in the night.
You know, what's really interesting about these places,
where we get these ideas, they all have one thing in common which is
they're unintentional. They're the places we spontaneously
invent. It is almost impossible to innovate
in an intentional manner I would argue. I would argue that in fact,
all the greatest innovations in history have been accidental. All the greatest
geniuses have had the most genius ideas when they weren't looking for them.
Now what does that tell us about
innovation? What it tells us is, that many of our processes,
are defective. We've got teams which are
engineered to innovate, and then we wonder why they lack genius.
When actually what we need to do is to tell them to go and have a shower
at home, and after they've done that, to go and sleep for a very long
time. Now the reason why I'm saying that is because
I think there are some are some aspects of medical tape
that apply, where the answers we need are so complicated,
that they will not come through an engineered thought process.
I'll give you an example where I'm expecting breakthrough technologies to happen. It's
not in any one of these spheres. You see, in the olden days
life was very simple, we'd say, 'We have a biotech team.' Or, we'd say, 'We have a
and mobile connectivity team or we have the world's largest computers
also working with Nanotech.' For me, I tell you this:
All the most exciting areas of Medtech that I'm seeing right now
are fusions of several different kinds of teams.
And the biggest risk I'm seeing
in Medtech right now, is that almost every single Medtech startup I see
are one discipline teams..it's a physicist and maybe get an engineer and
if you're lucky, you get a gene therapist in there as well
- and a couple of mathematicians. But there it stops. I'm seeing very narrow specialty
bases inside many
Medtech companies. Even mature, even very large ones..
who had a fantastic success with one runaway product, and then
they came back in with the same skill-set to produce another one.
And then another one. We've been hearing these kinds of stories. But they're
quite,
quite focused and narrow
and I want to suggest to you, that a world is changing too fast for them.
You see, stuff happens and all innovation happens on the outer edge of the radar
screen.
And I can tell you that most of the largest corporations in the world that I
work with
are seeing their strategies consistently overtaken
by events. And I believe this same thing is gonna happen
to a higher percentage of the Medtech companies today that are currently successful.
Stuff happens. It doesn't matter who you are or what is that you're looking for,
Stuff happens. And all things connect together
all other things in our joined up world. A single event
in Japan, that lasts 5 minutes, is enough to transform the energy policy of
Germany
for the next 35 years. And the energy policy of Japan too.
That, in itself, will have further knock-ons and consequences
for the way our world operates and affects the global economy.
A single, a single mutant virus
that attacks only 862 people, sorry,
only 8,600 people of which
860 died: I'm of course talking about cells,
that was enough, not only to disrupt parts of the global economy
not only to ground every single plane
in much of Asia, but was also enough to transform the whole of public policy
worldwide, which is why we were better placed when swine flu came
along.
It's affected the whole way we think about threat.
And these things, as we say, all connect to just about everything else as well. And while
we may say
that a presidential election may not affect Medtech too much,
I think it may affect it more than we think.