Fast Talk: Mother (and Fathers) of Invention

Mark Stefik

Research fellow and manager,
Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Palo Alto, California

We live and work in what I call an "innovation ecology," a collection of people and organizations whose joint contributions make breakthroughs possible. It includes universities, government funders, venture capitalists, designers, marketing departments, and corporate labs. The challenge is to bring ideas together.

What not to do: Fill a room with people from a single discipline. Or get a bunch of people from many different disciplines, and throw them all together. Either everyone has the same background, so it's hard to come up with big, surprising ideas, or people are so different they can't understand one another.

Something magical happens when you bring together a group of people from different disciplines with a common purpose. It's a middle zone, the breakthrough zone. The idea is to start a team on a problem--a hard problem, to keep people motivated. When there's an obstacle, instead of dodging it, bring in another point of view: an electrical engineer, a user interface expert, a sociologist, whatever spin on the market is needed. Give people new eyeglasses to cross-pollinate ideas.

For every invention, there are two fundamental questions: What is possible and what is needed? The back-and-forth is the dance of the two questions. You have to bring together people who are familiar enough with both sides of the equation long enough to understand one another and explore the problem together. For people who love invention, that's where the action is.

We're now working with corporate sponsors to explore the strategic challenges and technological directions they're interested in. Teams change as the scope of the problem and possibilities become evident. The teams are small. Early on, they have to be small enough--three to six people--to run fast and break some rules.

But they are teams. There are cute stories about a lone inventor of some little thing--one of those "as seen on TV" gadgets--and that's really fun and wonderful. That's not the kind of breakthrough I'm talking about. This is about making breakthroughs a way of life.

David M. Lederman

Chairman and CEO, Abiomed
Danvers, Massachusetts

It's my mission to build artificial implantable hearts. When I began thinking about the idea more than 30 years ago, the country had the will to achieve things that the world said were not achievable. A man had just landed on the moon. I wanted to do something important and life changing.

There were no illusions that this was going to be quick. No other medical device that has entered clinical practice has had such a long development phase. Some necessary technologies did not exist when we started. We did not have batteries with enough energy to power a mechanical heart so patients could walk around freely. In 1977, we estimated it would take 20 years before the technologies we needed would converge. And we were right.

Along the way, we've created lesser technologies. Our team developed an intra-aortic balloon pump, an artificial heart valve, and a cardiac-assist system which has been used by millions of patients. Like landing on the moon, which led to the development of bar-coding, building an artificial implantable heart is the original mission, but it's not the only mission. Whatever the invention, you have to be open and ready for potential by-products.

You also have to be prepared for setbacks. The first attempt is seldom successful. It's an indication of what you need to do so that the second attempt is better. There's no straight path. We've had to return to fundamentals and work very hard to keep up with scientific advances. Some of us spent seven years simply learning how blood clots.

Today, the AbioCor has been implanted in 11 patients. In a sense, we have landed on the moon. We set out to provide two months of reasonable life to a patient who had less than a month to live. One man survived for a record 17 months before his death. Frankly, we didn't expect that kind of success so soon. We also didn't anticipate the higher expectations that would emerge with that success. That's been the biggest challenge.