"Innovation Overdrive" in Healthcare?
This afternoon as I perused the blogs, I ran across a piece by Harvard Business School's Bill Taylor about Innovation Overdrive. Taylor defines Innovation Overdrive as:
What is Innovation Overdrive? First, the gnawing sense that even though breakthrough advances in computing, communications, and consumer electronics are wonderful, anything in excess is a poison—and it feels like we’re all chugging from a poisoned chalice.
While his main topic of discussion is the sub-prime mortgage snafu, it did make me think about last MOD's Healthcare Innovation class with Dr. Michael Burcham. As its name implies, the class explores current evolutionary and revolutionary thinking in healthcare. Although Burcham's background is in disease management, he hits five of the major areas in healthcare - Pharma, Biotech, IT, Services, and Devices (the illustration on the right is taken from his class notes). Innovation, according to Burcham, isn't in the circles themselves so much as its in the "white spaces" between them. An interesting notion, to say the least, and fodder for many a discussion throughout the MOD.
But Taylor raises a larger issue, which is whether runaway and largely unjustified "innovation" is, in some respect, irresponsible. Over the past year and a half we've spent quite a bit of time talking about a variety of companies that are adding to the ever-incresing pie but haven't quite shown that they're giving back more than they're taking, so to speak.
And while I agree that trying to make peoples' lives better is a good and just thing, I also think that at some point we must hold each other accountable to some set of standards that show we're making a good and lasting contribution.
Unfortunately, I don't know what those standards are, nor do I have a clue as to their formulation. Any ideas?
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