Comments on: Getting Disruptive Ideas to Market

By: Jan

Jan — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:31:41 +0000

Thanks for the inspiration. I think BSC is a wonderful company.
Jan

By: bill h.

bill h. — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:45:56 +0000

John, thank you for your insights. Success is an idea. Ideas exist only in the interchange between humans. It follows that the success of ideas is dependent upon human relationships.

By: Carl Shurtleff

Carl Shurtleff — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 22:24:02 +0000

Mr. Abele,

Congratulations on your 2007 SAGES Pioneer in Endoscopy Award.

As somone working in this space, I too would like a copy of your “Physician Atttibutte” list

Thanks in advance,

CJS

By: Liam

Liam — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:27:08 +0000

John,

I couldn’t agree with you more regarding attributes of physicians. I am interested to see your checklist. I feel it is important to re-evaluate these “physicians” as the technology/innovation becomes accepted; to assure you have the proper mix of expereinced and new physicians (so that you can have a more representative “voice of the customer”). After all, the innovation will only be new up until the next disruption.

By: JB

JB — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:49:06 +0000

I would also like the physician’s attribute list. As a vendor to BSX, your comments were very interesting and timely.
Regards,
JB

By: David

David — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:22:00 +0000

Very interesting. I would like a copy of the physician checklist. Do you think the atributes might translate to other industries?

Best,

David

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 18:33:01 +0000

John,
I appreciate the insight and, as a former member of the Boston Scientific family, have appreciated your work from the inside. I would be quite interested in a copy of physician checklist of attributes.
Best regards,
Craig

By: bill

bill — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:25:49 +0000

It is too bad the theory is not driving value for shareholders today.

By: Kurt

Kurt — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:53:06 +0000

John:

Thank you for the inspiring post. I would like to follow up on your offer and ask you for the checklist of attributes that you used to pick physicians.

Kurt

By: Bill Aulet

Bill Aulet — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:15:13 +0000

I just wanted to add to John’s solid discussion on what it takes to get innovation in the market place based on our experience at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center.
The question of what kind of traction a disruptive innovation (note the word “technololgy” is not used here) gets is indeed one of the most interesting riddles in business today.

I think it is helpful to first make sure we properly defined the elements and parameters involved:
1. Invention does not equal innovation. Innovation equals invention plus commercialization. (credit Ed Roberts, MIT Sloan Professor and Kendall Square entrepreneurial fixture for decades). This is a very important distinction. Patents, ideas, technologies or other “un-implemented” inventions create no value on their own. They need the commercializer — and a commericalizer needs a good (not necessarily great) idea.
2. Innovations can be technology but more often they can be new business models (see Google — hint the business innovation breakthrough that made them successful wasn’t the algorithium … and by the way it wasn’t even their own but more on that later) or processes. Some of the most interesting and impactful innovations today have to do more with business models and delivery processes (see Amazon or more recently the Enernoc IPO for an examples of this phenomenon) than with technology.
3. Innovations do not have to derived from an internally generated idea but more and more come externally and are simply more effectively applied by the new player than the original. See Apple (who did not invent the core technology in the Mac, iPod or iPhone) or Google (it was Overture’s idea on the key word advertising). Henry Cheesebrough addressed this very well in his “Open Innovation” book and it is becoming more and more true as time goes by.

I offer these brief comments as my personal lessons learned regarding innovation. I have found they provide a bit more structure so innovators in small, medium and large companies can be more effective in promoting an environment where innovation may flourish.