Innovation: What is my Responsibility?

Workshop to Innovate
June 24, 2011
Bethesda North Marriott

Forty years ago, John F. Kennedy made this famous declaration at his Inauguration: “… ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.” It is incumbent on us to ask “What is my responsibility in this quest to accelerate diagnostic and therapy development?”

Innovation. Easy to say. Modern sounding, and even trendy: President Obama used the word ten times in his State of the Union address and has launched a couple of programs focused on it since then.

Innovation rides the edge between the selflessness of the Kennedy statement and the competitiveness in Obama’s directive that Americans ‘out-innovate’ everyone else. This year we took a deep dive into this space, and asked, “How is it my responsibility to live in dynamic tension with these two poles? How can I liberate energy in systems bound in one direction or the other, to accelerate translational research and implementation science?”

Steve Jobs said, “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have... It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.”  We get it. We need to get it, we need to lead. During this session, participants took this leap together.

We’ve all been in meetings and conversations where the problem is ‘them’. We come to the resolution together that we don’t have the diagnostics and treatments we need because [fill in the blank: companies, academics, regulators, investors, the public, patients, etc.] don’t do their part, are greedy, are selfish, have the wrong motivations… It’s time to get over this and get to work. This requires that we are each responsible for the whole, and we step into each other’s roles. In this workshop, we rolled up our sleeves and created cooperative teams to develop viable solutions.

Agenda