The Re-Appreciation of Science

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist#TheIncrementalist

On this episode I talked to Rob Lowe, CEO of WellSpring a company focused on identifying technology and intellectual property and successfully rolling out that technology. Rob was a college professor who taught classes and strategy and innovation management and turned that into a company that provides software platforms to help bring early-stage ideas into products in the marketplace.

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We talk about the history of innovation and the network effect – the interactions between the producer of the technology and complementary technologies and distribution channels and the difficulty of aligning all these disparate groups. As we have seen in the past – great technology does not always emerge as a commercial success. But recent accelerated successes like the COVID19 vaccine that was developed over at least a 10-year period with funding coming from NIH and various universities to create a mix of technologies that came together in a great success story of multiple COVID19 vaccines. The importance of partnerships has increased over time along with the complexity of matching and finding the right groups so they can identify potential partners and manage complex intellectual property requirements. We discuss the innovation consortium and the special case that came together to produce the Compact Disc (CD).

We dive into the complexity of bringing all these groups together, using the COVID19 vaccine and Moderna as an example, and dive into the changing nature of innovation. Rob shares the breakdown of different types of innovation from the incremental or “H1” horizon through to adjacent possible (H2) and the moonshots (H3).

Their survey of innovation report (accessible here) from last year shows a significant shift away from the 70% focus that used to be on incremental improvements to a more even split of 1/3 of investments across the 3 areas. While there is more focus and investment on the moon shot and the adjacent possible that is not at the expense of Incremental Steps:

all sorts of moonshot innovations require a lot of incremental work and incremental innovations to get there

Listen in to hear about the massive transformation taking place in healthcare and the tremendous opportunities for organizations that meet the minimum scale required to be able to stand up innovation hubs and organizations to accelerate change in healthcare. In fact, while many are larger organizations, as Rob points out we are finding the steady decreasing cost of infrastructure to innovate which ones the door for even more opportunities to enable more entrepreneurs to create solutions that benefit all of us and can come quickly to market.

About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.