You might have to risk your job, but pushing innovation through in an otherwise stifling corporate environment is certainly possible, said Paul Thompson, director of IT innovation at Medtronic, at MedCity’s CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia.
Speaking on the architecture of innovation, Thompson used the medical device giant’s “Hospital of the Future” as a platform to discuss how even large companies can break away from their standard business models and try something different.
Medtronic’s futuristic “hospital” is actually a high-tech showroom that the company’s customers can walk through to see its vision of the future. This model of tomorrow’s hospital has spurred projects to develop a house of the future and a hospital in an emerging market – allowing the company to illustrate the challenges the current medical field faces, and anticipate customer needs.
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But the journey to create these centers — there are actually four now, in Minnesota, Switzerland, China and Ireland — was an uphill one. (Thompson likened it to reinventing the wheel — he played a video of cavemen discussing the merits of the wheel as one might in a corporate meeting.) But this required innovative approaches to both conceptualizing a futuristic health care center and also demonstrating to company leadership that different approaches to customer engagement can actually work.
“We built it in a few months, but the journey to take this as a new business model at Medtronic has been a four-year journey,” Thompson said. “I was told by leadership to drop the Hospital of the Future — ‘It’ll kill your career,’ they said, so it takes a bit of persistence to drive a concept forward.”
