A short while ago, while attending the IDSA NED conference, CoCreate, I had the pleasure of watching a presentation by Ben Hopson. Hopson introduces himself as a “kinetic designer,” and throughout the presentation drives home the importance of maintaining design thinking through the aesthetics from the way it looks to the way it works. A product can be beautifully designed, perform wonderfully, but many times the mechanical aspects of it fall short of what could be a completely positive user experience.

For another interesting resource on the latest innovations in health care delivery, check out Harvard Business Review’s web page: “Insight Center”: it’s a growing collection of new articles and opinions that reflect the informed thinking on how to redesign and deliver top-quality health care.  Also included on this site are a few “classics” that provide an excellent foundation for anyone interested in how some top business thinkers understand the American Health Care delivery system.

This new technology seems pretty interesting…the implications are kind of mind-blowing.

Tapping your forearm or hand with a finger could soon be the way you interact with gadgets. The Skinput system makes it easy to control gadgets by tapping on the arm.

US researchers have found a way to work out where the tap touches and use that to control phones and music players. Coupled with a tiny projector the system can use the skin as a surface on which to display menu choices, a number pad or a screen.

A clinical trial is currently underway to investigate a new vaccine called CDX-110, which is used to treat brain cancer.  This vaccine prompts the immune system to attack foreign invaders in the body, in this case the cancerous cells.  The vaccine causes white blood cells, known as T-cells to attach the tumor.  T-cells assist the immune system, and they attack malignant cells due to their different genetic makeup than normal cells in the body.  Unlike chemotherapy, which is very harmful to all living cells in the body, CDX-110 creates an immune system stimulant that is precise—attacking only foreign cells.

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Institute for Health Care Improvement’s National Quality Forum in Orlando. I listened to world-renowned economist, Uwe Reinhardt, discuss the highly reticulated social, cultural, political, and economic inequities that help determine global and individual health. His talk followed that of Marshall Ganz, who drew on his experience both as a grassroots community organizer and as a public policy expert, to explain how clinicians might collectivize our individual quality improvement initiatives into a social movement. While it is not unheard of for economists and policy experts to weigh in on health care issues, the scope of their talks reached well beyond their respective disciplines, venturing into the realms of anthropology, philosophy and even ancient history.

In his latest article on health care reform,http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/14/091214fa_fact_gawande,Atul Gawande likens health care to agriculture, which in the 1900’s was also strangling our country’s economy:

In 1900, more than 40% of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power.
Gawande takes us through our government’s history of pulling our country out of the grips of the agricultural crisis, which did not entail sweeping, radical change, but rather, fostering pockets of innovation and staging pilots of trial and error.

One of the advantages held by larger corporations with large R&D teams is that there is a depth of knowledge and experience held by their employees that can be applied to new programs from their inception. This helps to bring the programs farther, faster and transfers expertise into those programs.

The paradox is that because of the sheer scale of these teams, individuals who might possess this knowledge are not always exposed to the very opportunities where they could apply it. Perhaps they acquired that experience at a previous job, or maybe their own career growth within the company has moved them into another position. As program managers, it is frustrating to spend six weeks solving a particular problem only to learn that several individuals within the company had dealt with a similar problem years ago but were not sought out to facilitate the solution.

One would be hard pressed to find a company these days that isn’t talking about becoming more innovative. The term is so widely used, and so broadly defined, that it’s on the verge of losing any meaningful impact. I just had the opportunity to see Guy Kawasaki speak on the “Art of Innovation,” which was something he originally posted on his blog titled how to change the world back in 2006. I don’t disagree that there is an “art” to innovation, and his speech was quite good and inspiring, but—like any art form—the way in which innovation is interpreted, embraced, and implemented in organizations is subject to a liberal amount of “creative license.” It can be like, “Yes, innovation – let’s do that!” without a full commitment to its wide scale implications.
Being truly committed to innovation changes the way you approach your work each day, forces new mindsets, and requires that one be open to new ways of working and acting differently. It demands accepting that great success also goes hand in hand with great risks and great failures. And understanding that once you ARE innovative you have to start right over again – because as soon as you are, you aren’t.

Recently, Ximedica adopted the tagline "Living Innovation" (now also the title of this blog). At first, I thought "what does that mean?" I had no idea until recently.

We were having our annual offsite meeting and I was asked to give a brief presentation to my co-workers on how my work fits in with the total Ximedica device development process. With less than 24 hrs to prepare, I came up with an analogy:

The mechanical engineers build the bones, joints, movements, the structure.
The designers wrap the skin and flesh around the structure.
The electrical engineers provide nerves, senses, stimulation, energy.
The software engineers enable the object to think and react.

Together, we bring LIFE to a NEWLY created object that will positively impact our lives.

That's what 'Living Innovation' means to me.

Carl B Dumas
Senior Software Engineer
'Toujours Prêt'

With all the talk that’s going on about H1N1, I thought David McCandless did a great job of putting the threat into perspective.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/fatal-infection/