Here’s the round-up of the week in the newsfeeds. Below I highlight my favourite articles of the week from each category.
Today’s Top Pick – “Use Biomimicry to Make Better Products (and Companies)“. Find out more under Business and Entrepreneurship.
Even Einstein had to do the research
Four months into our immersion in the Biodesign fellowship here at Stanford University (with a team of two physicians and two engineers designing medical devices), I can finally say what I think is working for us: understanding the science.
After spending a month in the hospital looking for problems and a month in the office looking at the patients affected by the problem and data about the problem, we brainstormed ideas on how to fix it. The result: if we didn’t go into the room with great information on the problem, we didn’t come out of the room with great ideas on how to solve it.
Taking a close look at needs
Today one of my co-workers aptly said “this design process is about learning how to decide where to use your time.” The first part of that decision comes in finding “needs.” The design process he was talking about is the “Biodesign” course here at Stanford University that we (a team of two physicians and two engineers) are using to design medical devices.
In our first month my team members and I did a small design project, which I wrote about in my last post. Now in our second month, we traveled around Stanford Hospital and clinics looking for real clinical opportunities: issues that affect patients, physicians and the hospital as a whole. These are often, but not exclusively, medical problems. They’re problems that have a partial solution or no solution at all. My favorite are what we termed the “Geez needs” – when the practitioner says “geez” because they’re unhappy about a problem or about the solution that they use to solve the problem.
Open Source
What prevents researchers from collaborating – from combining ideas required to generate innovative solutions to intractable scientific or social problems? According to Harvard Business School prof Karim Lakhani, the answer is two-fold: professional competitiveness that encourages rivalry, and intellectual property protections that discourage partnerships.
Even more intriguing is Lakhani’s suggestion for addressing these problems: bringing the philosophy and the methodology of open source software into the world of scientific inquiry. In a recent interview published on the HBS “Working Knowledge” website, Lakhani argues that “broadcasting” problems – i.e. introducing them to outsiders – not only accelerates problem-solving, but that the broader the web of outsiders engaged, the more likely the problem is to be solved.
The most important lesson: the idea of “open source” is not limited to software, nor is it an aberration. Instead, it’s a new model for problem-solving based on three key norms: transparency (sharing information), permeable access (creating mechanisms to allow for new inputs) and collaborations (working with multiple partners).
What struck me was Lakhani’s conviction that the most exciting breakthroughs happen where sectors and industries converge: “innovations happen at the intersection of disciplines,” he says. “People have talked about that a lot and I think we’re providing some systematic evidence of that now with this study.”
Open source is a more than a philosophy – it’s a metaphor for an age when the most exciting initiatives, organizations and companies are emerging from the “intersection of disciplines” Lakhani talks about – and that MaRS is working to foster and facilitate.
The article, “Open Source Science: A New Model for Innovation” can be viewed in full at:
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5544.html
In many ways, Noah was a entrepreneur himself: he saw a need in the market, paid no attention to the skeptics, had a well-engineered plan, and hit his milestones (the main one being to finish before the rain starts).
Here’s a great article listing the top 18 mistakes that would have killed Noah’s enterprise, written by an investor. Follow the link for an explanation of each point. Enjoy. And remember, there’s always a rainbow after the storm.
