I asked Dr. Graham, the author of Innovation the Cleveland Clinic Way: Powering Transformation by Putting Ideas to Work this question: You talk about these practices, and I assume you believe they could be used by others in the medical field, that’s why you wrote the book, but what about outside the medical field?
An excerpt from the podcast: Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic (Link includes Transcription and Podcast Link)
Dr. Graham: Two questions and let me try to take each one of them. We don’t only think that we’ve proven it. Five years ago, we launched the Global Healthcare Innovation Alliance and the basis to that was we were being approached by leaders from medical systems all over the country. Hey, you guys have taken this innovation thing, you’ve invested in it, it’s become an important part of your identity, it’s helping people, it’s allowing you to recruit, retain and reward top talent, we want in on it and how do you do it? Well, we said, hey listen, we can share it. And so instead of a build, it became a partnership. Because I said, listen, we’ve made practically every mistake. It’s hard. When we were out there, you can always tell the scouts because they had the arrows in. We were forging this trail. You don’t have to require all your colleagues to go through the decade and a half or 20-year process that you did. You can say, come aboard and let’s collaborate because I bet you; there’s a key on your campus to the lock we have on our campus, and that’s what we found.
We now help operate the innovation infrastructure for partners all over the country, including the largest healthcare systems in six or seven other states. People said, okay I get that. You’re a hospital, they’re a hospital, you guys have a lot to talk about. And then we added Notre Dame, a traditional research university at the highest echelon. Hey, it worked great. They have biomechanical engineers. Frankly, they have business school students and lawyers who want to learn about how to handle intellectual property. So that was a great partnership.
But then, when we introduced Parker Hannifin, a 14 billion dollar motion control giant that is actually Cleveland-based, people scratched their head like, wait a minute, they’re a traditional engineering firm, why is the Cleveland Clinic partnering with them over innovation? And I kind of tell them the metaphorical story, hey Parker, what do you do? Well, we run fluids or tubes with valves in it. You wouldn’t be interested. But wait a minute, that’s exactly what our cardiologists and neurologists think about all day. What happens? A very robust medical device portfolio evolves. So all of a sudden, that ball starts rolling downhill. We then added Cox Communications, the Atlanta giant that touches one out of every three American every day. Why? I’m not going to develop cable programming, but where’s healthcare going? Mobile device and in the home.
The concepts not only can be directly or in an adjacent space translated. The concepts of making an innovation culture blossom at your organization and then employing these outside the academy, outside of academic healthcare and research universities can absolutely happen. Whether you’re running an engineering shop, whether you’re running a service industry, innovation is going to be critical; thinking of the next thing, always improving. And frankly, we believe that the methodologies that we’ve identified translate far out of the hospital, far out of the not for profit sector. Whatever you’re doing, I think that there’s a lot to be learned by the odyssey on which we started all those years ago.
An excerpt from the podcast: Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic (Link includes Transcription and Podcast Link)