Barbara Spurrier MHA, the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation founding and current administrative director, was a guest last week on the Business901 podcast. She just recently co-authored an outstanding book on innovation, Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast: A Blueprint for Transformation from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation and I found one of the areas particularly fascinating and followed up with the question below.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Innovation At Mayo
Joe: One of the things I found interesting in the book is – of course, you are putting the patient and the user experience upfront and first and everything – but very early in the process, you talk about a discovery process of yourself, and “who are we?” Can you explain why you want to dig in about your team and understand “you”, when you are innovating for others?
Barbara: Absolutely. We think it’s so important that we really think about the team members, the roles, the responsibilities and how we can all come together around our core mission, which is to transform the experience in delivery of health and health care. As we tried to understand and learn from other industries about innovation, we started to learn a lot about the need of thinking differently – if we just keep approaching things the way we always have in health care, we are going to keep generating the results that, we believe, are not optimal as we imagine in transformed health and health care system.
We started to tease apart what are the kinds of skill sets and team members that will need to move innovation forward. We also wanted to understand – of course, we need our physicians, our scientists, our nurses and our care team members – but we needed to bring in some new methodologies, not just about the model that has been so prevalent in the health care industry, which is the scientific model, where it’s so much about proving and disproving a hypothesis.
What we’re finding in design and design thinking is – how do we open things up to understand the perspective of patients and people and customer needs. That really requires bringing in some new skill sets and ways of thinking. We started to see that the intersection of things, and the intersection of people, is really where the innovation will come from, and committed to building a very multi-disciplinary team of designers, engineers, physicians, scientists and technologists. We really all come together around this commitment to innovation.
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