In high-tech fields such as nanotechnology and “smart” devices, breakthroughs increasingly demand the integration of multiple technical fields. Knowing how to achieve real collaboration will make the difference between success and failure. But many people are very skeptical when asked to join collaborations, because the majority of these end up being dominated by the same voices, so it’s a waste of time for others to make much effort. Either that, or the group stays split into the original camps that were supposed to be brought together. Either way, there is no true benefit gained by working “together.”

One reason real collaboration is so rare is that few people have paid much attention to how to achieve it. In fact, many executives mistakenly believe that to lead they must dominate and control every activity, which discourages others from collaborating. But if you’ve ever worked with an expert collaborator, you know that quite the opposite is true. To get a diverse crowd to work together, the leader actually has to give up a certain amount of control, take some risks, and encourage creative thinking. By doing this, the leader creates an atmosphere of trust and openness. He or she proves that they really want to hear all opinions, and that everyone will be treated fairly, but with accountability.

Many people can’t even recognize real collaboration when they see it. But a few people seem to naturally excel at it. They take the time and effort to set the stage properly and get the right people working together. The goal is to make each participant feel comfortable offering honest opinions and their best ideas. The key is to create a balance between respect for each other’s contributions and an appreciation for every idea being constructively challenged.

The best examples that I have seen of this “collaborative state” are in some surprising places. I first witnessed it while helping to develop a new type of medical meeting in the 1970s: the live demonstration course. Such meetings were, and still are, controversial because they telecast real-time surgical procedures on actual patients—a daring technique, but one that seems to have a lot of advantages as well. These meetings were also unusual when they started because they included commercial, academic, and professional presenters, which was very different from the academically focused society meetings.

Live demonstration meetings like TCT, the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics symposium, and ISET, the International Symposium on Endovascular Therapy, have since become very popular because they facilitate more learning than typical society meetings do. Done correctly, a live demonstration course showcases “peak collaboration.”

The key to these meetings’ success is having an adept moderator, who sets the stage and expertly manages the participants. The sessions feature diverse views, experience, and culture. It is a much broader range of views than you see at a traditional academic meeting, and here, each comment is judged by its content, not by the speaker’s “credentials.” And while the discussion is often quite candid, there is little or none of the pontification and bullying that is so common in most boardrooms or at academic meetings. Everyone feels comfortable speaking, but the level of the discourse is also very high.

During the actual live demonstrations, an expert panel with contrarian views comments, questions, and advises the procedure in real time to yield a rich synthesis of opinions, expertly shaped by a skilled moderator. The audience may even help direct discussion through audience response systems. The audience gets an extraordinary learning experience, while the patient has the benefit of a whole panel of experts’ opinions.

There’s a wide range of ideas constantly flowing, and the best ones tend to rise above the others much more easily here than in other settings. In my opinion, the live demonstration meeting has been the most significant factor in accelerating the advancement of medical technology. Much of that success is due to the way the meeting moderators bring the audience and other participants to a “collaborative state.”

Another example of true collaboration occurs at FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a student competition in which teaching collaboration is a specific goal, so it becomes ingrained into student behavior. The way the game is designed, teams cannot win without collaborating—not just among themselves, but with competitors, judges, and observers as well. On top of that, the contestants learn “gracious professionalism,” which obliges everyone to behave in a fair and polite manner. FIRST brings participants to a collaborative state.

These examples show that the roots of real collaboration are openness, creativity, and …Next Page »

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Editor’s note: Three weeks ago, John Abele, a co-founder of Boston Scientific, wrote Getting Disruptive Ideas to Market, one of our most popular posts so far. One point he made was that:

“marketing and funding folk will be pushing hard for you to get some big name scientific and other advisors on the masthead for credibility purposes. Yes, a few may be valuable, but remember, these are people who are already famous. They have nothing to gain…Finding the unknown younger scientist, engineer, or physician who has the capabilities and desire is much more important.”

A number of readers asked for the checklist of physician’s attributes John mentioned that Boston Scientific used to pick its advisors, who would then help the company test and improve its devices. One reader even asked if the list applied to other industries. We pinged John to follow-up. Here’s his response:

Here’s the list, and a little bit more. And of course they apply to different industries, although the specific criteria may change to varying degrees. The most important principle is what makes an individual credible to various audiences.

I used to give this list to people we were considering and ask them to rate themselves on each parameter…on a scale of 1 to 5. It had a powerful influence on the dynamic of our discussions. We want people who tell us the good and the bad, and the implications of both.

Editor again: John sent along a PowerPoint containing the list, and “a little bit more.” You can find it here.

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I’m interested in how one takes inventions to scale. Obviously, that is what Boston Scientific was all about. How do you get a disruptive idea, in particular, into the marketplace? In my opinion, people frequently take the wrong approach.

Disruptive ideas are very threatening to the establishment, or whoever owned that marketspace before. They may be products or technology like the iPOD (catheter surgery in the case of BSC), or they can be processes or services like Amazon or eBay. Or they can be social ideas like a bike path into the city. They can lead to dramatic changes in the field to which the idea applies. That can mean different people will use and control it. And it will be used differently with a different infrastructure and in different locations. There will be economic implications with winners and losers. And the idea will influence many others indirectly.

So how do you overcome the resistance of the establishment (surgeons in the case of BSC, but it could be academia, professional societies, big companies, the government, etc.)? Hire PR? Most of the PR and advertising guys are great if the idea is accepted, lousy if the idea is not accepted. Your goal is to get it accepted. And that to me is the fun part of business. New ideas grow best with viral approaches and that’s all about relationships and reputation.

Don’t go after the biggest idea first.
A disruptive technology can have many applications. If you get funding for it, the funders will want to go after the biggest application first in order to justify the investment. That’s a dumb thing to do, because new ideas and technologies evolve. They grow like a plant as more and more is learned. And there will be lots of problems early on. If you go for the biggest application first, you will create unmeetable expectations which will arm the establishment with more arguments to destroy you. And even mini-failures will be hard to recover from. Pick an application that is smaller and you can more easily find, or create, champions who will become disciples. Their expectations will be more modest. They will be more forgiving when things don’t go right. Over time they will become your unpaid sales force and your R&D department. You won’t just be creating a product and customers, you will be creating a movement.

And you’ve got to be patient. It took us (BSC) over 20 years to help get the Less Invasive Surgery business going. The ATM for banks took well over a decade to catch on. You can not only be too early for the market because your technology isn’t finished, but too early for the market because customers aren’t ready for it—which means the establishment is going to pull every trick in the book to dismiss you.

At BSC, we took our disruptive catheter technologies and went for smaller niche markets. These smaller markets (for example pediatric cardiology) allowed us to experiment. Our customers developed new applications. They suggested modifications. They came up with great accessories to extend the use and improve the results of the procedures for which the products were designed. I used to even make “care packages” for some inventor docs that would contain special wires, tubing, molds, heat guns, shrink tubing, etc, so they could make prototypes themselves. They loved it. We had friends for life, and gained a few good product ideas as well.

There are lots of other examples of technologies that have enormous applications, where it was, or is, important to debug them first. By doing so, you will not only be learning more about the technology, but also the marketing and communication strategies that you may want to follow if in fact it does become super big. By going after smaller markets first, you can evolve, define, and develop more IP. You can do an awful lot of things that will increase the likelihood of a successful attack on the big market when you get there.

Build in-depth knowledge and trust it in hard times.
If it really is a new idea, you will not only be developing the product(s), you will be developing the language and the science behind it—the ontology and taxonomy for talking about it. It’s hard, but when you get there you will have created that market—and you will own it.

The marketing and funding folk will be pushing hard for you to get some big name scientific and other advisors on the masthead for credibility purposes. Yes, a few may be valuable, but remember, these are people who are already famous. They have nothing to gain (except money, of course, and that can sometimes be a bad motivator) and everything to lose. Finding the unknown younger scientist, engineer, or physician who has the capabilities and desire is much more important. They have everything to gain and nothing to lose. I’ll put my bet on the motivated entrepreneurial type every time. I have a checklist of attributes that we used to pick physicians. Ask me if you’re interested. [Editor's note: John was getting so many requests for the list that we posted it here.]

Focus.
Traditional business experts will always say you’ve got to focus in order to apply your limited resources effectively. But if you’re dealing with a truly new idea, that may be the wrong thing to do because you don’t yet know where the best spot to focus is. You’ve got to be able to say, ‘It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but in fact we are focusing. We are taking little pieces of many markets and leveraging the daylights out of it, in order to create a new market.’ If your customers are your partners, and they should be, they can help you make the right decisions.

Always build your credibility and reputation.
Who do you trust more; someone who is selling you something which you’ve never heard of before, or someone who is selling something familiar from a well-known company? Everything else being equal, with most people, the affiliation with the well-known brand and organization is a reputational asset. So it’s critical to earn the respect and trust of both your customers and the community members, including competitors, of the field you will be working with.

General Georges Doriot, founder of American Research and Development and considered one of the fathers of venture capital, was a charmer and had an enormous Rolodex. He told me that it was his most valuable asset. He was a generous person, a mentor to many and always doing favors for people. But that generosity had an enlightened self-interest to it. The Rolodex represented his relationships and the personal credibility and reputation that went along with it. That was his most important investment.

I think people sometimes get so caught up in the competition of financial results that they forget that the thing that’s going to give them the best likelihood of success in the future is the relationship metrics.

This is all common sense, of course, and pretty obvious. But it’s amazing how often we forget the obvious.

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