We Love Innovation. Don’t We?

By Kim Bellard, April 22, 2022

America loves innovation. We prize creativity. We honor inventors. We are the nation of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Jonas Salk, Steve Jobs, and Stephen Spielberg, to name a few luminaries. Our intellectual property protection for all that innovation is the envy of the world.

But, as it turns out, maybe not so much. If there’s any doubt, just look at our healthcare system.

Matt Richtel writes in The New York Times “We Have a Creativity Problem.” He reports on research from Katz, et. alia that analyzes not just what we say about creative people, but our implicit impressions and biases about them. Long story short, we may say people are creative but that doesn’t mean we like them or would want to hire them, and how creative we think they are depends on what they are creative about.

“People actually have strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative associations like vomit and poison,” Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the lead author on the new study, told Mr. Richtel.

Vomit and poison?

Well, at least our patent system, which protects intellectual property and helps fosters innovation, works, right? Again, not so much. A New York Times editorial charges: “The United States Patent and Trademark Office is in dire need of reform.”

If there’s any doubt, just look at the price of insulin, which has been propped up by patent “innovations” that keep its price high after a hundred years. “When it comes to protecting a drug monopoly,” The Times says, not limiting those monopolies to insulin, “it seems no modification is too small.”

The U.S. is still, by far, the leader in patents granted, but not in scientific research papers or R&D spending per capita/% of GDP, which makes one wonder what all those patents are for.

Healthcare desperately needs innovation. No one can dispute that; not anyone working in it, not anyone receiving care from it, not anyone who has had any exposure to it. But healthcare also has a lot of middle managers, and middlemen, and, as Professor Mueller said, “Novel ideas have almost no upside for a middle manager.”

Even worse, healthcare is always teetering on the edge of uncertainty — where’s the funding coming from, how much, what health crisis is coming, what’s the government going to do next? The forces causing all that uncertainty should be driving innovation, but, as Professor Morrison’s 2012 research also found, “…uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity.” We have blind spots about what creativity is, who creative people are, and when and how we should incorporate those into our organizations.

Right now, healthcare thinks that EHRs and digital health — whatever that might actually be — qualify as innovation. That’s enough, it believes; those are forcing change in ways and at a pace healthcare is not used to and is not comfortable with.

Too bad.

It has been said that if your company has an innovation department, it’s not innovative. If it has middle managers deciding which novel ideas get pursued, don’t expect real innovation. If it is ruling out hiring people who worked on unusual projects (think sex toys), it’s rejecting creativity.

Your biases against creativity may (not) be showing.

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)