Skip to main content

"I Have An Idea..."

How many great ideas started with "I have an idea..."?  (4 words.)

 Or "What if..?"  (Two words.)

Or "Why not..?"  (Two more.)

If you are an average-sized hospital, you have, maybe, 2,000 people working in your organization? Think there might be, say, 10 great ideas in there somewhere?  10 new, paradigm-busting, customer-delighting game changers?

2,000 people, ten great ideas, two words.  2,000/10+2

It's not exactly Pythagoras as math formulas go.  But before you question the power of new ideas, here's a headline for you: "Online gamers (i.e. scientific novices) crack AIDS enzyme puzzle."
"Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or Dungeons and Dragons: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade."
Kids, thinking differently, solving problems.  It's not that the ideas aren't out there, waiting.  They are.

"What if..?"

Leave a comment about how your organization is cultivating the next generation of game-changing ideas. Where do you find them? Nurture them? Reward them? Thanks!


Comments

Anonymous said…
How about giving people the ability to get health advice from a leading specialist from the comfort of home? Wouldn't it be great to grab a cup of coffee and get online to see a doctor when it was convenient for me? Well, now you can. This health innovation is located at www.2nd.md. We hope it will provide millions of people a great experience.
Steve Davis said…
OK commenter 'dford,' now that I've given your startup business some free publicity, do you have anything to say about ideation and/or innovation? That WAS my original question after all.

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved