From Joyce Wycoff:
It is sometimes said that only three percent of the population is actually trying to change the way the game is played. One of the three percenters in the field of innovation is John Wolpert Australia
One of the innovation thinkers John tracks is Henry Chesbrough, the author of Open Innovation, and John shares an interview with Hank who suggests that we should use a medical research model to “innovate innovation.” Here is a segment of the interview and we suggest that you go to John’s blog to read the full interview.
Chesbrough
: I have a belief that business research would do well to emulate what I understand to be the way medical research is conducted. Medical research proceeds on two parallel tracks: research and clinical research. The research track utilizes carefully controlled experimental settings to isolate causal mechanisms that explain biological functions of animals, humans, and disease. Meanwhile, clinicians seek to heal their patients, using whatever they can glean from the body of research being done. It is often the case, however, that the research known is not sufficient to heal many patients. In these cases, clinicians must pursue other means of healing. They may know of experiences with other patients where an approach “worked”, even though the reason for success was not well understood. One example of this is the use of many drugs “off label”, where the drug was approved for one indication, but is also used to treat other conditions for which the drug has not yet been shown to be effective in a double blind clinical trial.Wolpert : How would you say this approach is a game changer in the way we study business? How is that game put together now, and how would you intend to change it, given the chance?
Chesbrough : The point of this for business research is that businesses are highly complex systems, just like people are highly complex biological systems. Any carefully demonstrated, rigorous result in isolation faces many challenges as it is introduced into a complex system where the controls are off, and we’re operating in the wild. Does the theory still hold up here? Is the business getting healthier? Or is it still sick? In my view, business school research has under-emphasized the clinical dimension of this work. We’d be better off if more clinical research was conducted, and our theories would be better if we had more empirically valid data to develop them. This animates my own approach to studying innovation.
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