Point: Collaboration between doctors, patients, designers and lab technicians brings healthcare delivery breakthroughs.

Story: The inspiring origins of the Mayo Clinic illustrate the timelessness of collaborative innovation. Back in the 1880s, two brothers, Will and Charles Mayo, founded the clinic with their father, Dr. William Worrall Mayo, and introduced the concept of a group practice.  The Mayos sought medical breakthroughs by bringing together doctors, laboratory experts, and business people. As the younger Will Mayo said, “In order that the sick may have the benefit of advancing knowledge, a union of forces is necessary.”

Today, we have the fruits of many medical breakthroughs but need better ways to deliver the breakthroughs in efficient and effective ways.   Many chronic diseases, like diabetes, can be treated but depend on more than just a one-shot procedure in a doctor’s office or hospital.  For these conditions, healthcare delivery requires education and engagement between doctors and patients.  The quest for new breakthroughs in healthcare delivery calls for a new round of collaborative innovation, embodied by the Mayo Clinic’s SPARC unit.

The Mayo Clinic uses SPARC to develop new services for patients.  SPARC stands for See, Plan, Act, Refine, Communicate.  Mayo believes in a fast prototyping approach: a crossfunctional team of doctors, industrial designers, patient education experts, facilities people and financial analysts work together to create new ideas and test them in the “Hub.” The collaboration includes some of the usual healthcare and research leaders, like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, University of Minnesota, MIT, Yale, and GE Healthcare.  But it also attracts collaborators from industry, such as IDEO, Best Buy, Steelcase, Microsoft, and Cisco.

The Hub creates reconfigurable prototypes of patient check-in counters and examination rooms. The team that develops a new service can observe the prototypes in action through glass and via video.  “We take research out of the laboratory and translate it in a very quick and meaningful way right to the patient’s bedside,” said Dr. Glen Forbes, CEO of Mayo’s Rochester, MN campus. “That takes a lot of collaboration, because you’re crossing cultures and you’re often times crossing a lot of internal organization structures and silos.”

Most crucially, the Mayo Clinic engages patients to accelerate innovation.  “Our patients have a long history of participating in our research and education endeavors,” says Barbara Spurrier, Administrative Director, Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.  The Mayo uses ethnographic techniques to analyze the quality of doctor-patient interactions, survey patients for their impressions, and talk to patient’s families.  Human-centered design thinking ensures that the innovations aren’t just technically correct, they deliver higher quality of life for patients.

Action:

• Find a gap between technology and society, such as the gap between the capabilities of a technology (e.g., a medical treatment) and the delivery of that technology (e.g., a patient’s compliance)
• Recruit collaborators from both the technology side and the people side to bridge the gap
• Create tangible and testable examples of innovations through visualization, modeling and rapid prototyping
• Use both hard science and soft science methods to gain both objective and subjective feedback for further innovations

For more information:

Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation Partnerships

Leonard Berry and Kent Seltman, Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic: Inside One of the World’s Most Admired Service Organizations, 2008

Evan Rosen, The Culture of Collaboration: Maximizing the Time, Talent and Tools to Create Value in the Global Economy, 2009

Glenn S. Forbes, M.D.

Mayo Clinic and University of Minnesota partnership

Point: Breakthrough innovation requires nonlinear change

Story: In his presentation at the World Innovation Forum, strategist and Dartmouth professor Vijay Govindarajan used the analogy of Olympic high-jumping to illustrate the non-linear thinking that companies need to make to create breakthrough innovations. The traditional approach to high-jumping until 1920 was the “scissors” approach: jumping over the bar with a scissoring motion similar to what is used by hurdlers. The highest jump possible was about 5′ 3″.
The best approach to jumping higher, however, is to identify the limiting factor in the jump. For high-jumping, the limiting factor is the jumper’s configuration of body parts relative to their center of gravity and to the bar. In the 1920s, the innovation called the “western roll” changed the jumping style from a hurdling over the bar with a scissors kick to rolling over the bar sideways with the jumper’s back to the bar. In the 1960s, the innovation of the straddle changed the center of gravity even further with the jumpers keeping their belly to the bar. And in 1968 the Fosbury flop (invented by Dick Fosbury) changed the motion yet again: jumpers launch themselves straight up into the air using both feet, and then they twist over the bar so that the head clears first.
The challenge for organizations: you can’t win by incrementally improving the incumbent scissors kick if your competitors are inventing the western roll or the Fosbury flop. Breakthrough innovations require removing or changing the limiting factor. This often means breaking old assumptions. Prior to the Fosbury flop, all high jump techniques assumed that the jumper goes feet-first over the bar and lands on their feet. Fosbury jumped head first over the bar to flop on the mat and extended the possible jumping height to over 8 feet.
Action:

• Document the fundamental limits that seem to prevent further incremental innovation
• Consider ways to break those limits or bend those limits
• Examine the “how we’ve always done it” assumptions to find opportunities for radical change

See Vijay Govindarajan’s blog here.