{"id":3807,"date":"2025-02-18T07:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3807"},"modified":"2025-02-18T07:45:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:45:00","slug":"disruption-for-the-sake-of-disruption-is-not-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=3807","title":{"rendered":"Disruption For the Sake of Disruption Is Not Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By MIKE MAGEE<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>The technological leaps of the 1900s \u2014 microelectronics,\u00a0antibiotics, chemotherapy, liquid-fueled rockets,\u00a0Earth-observing satellites,\u00a0lasers, LED lights, disease-resistant seeds and so forth \u2014 derived from science. But these technologies also spent years being improved, tweaked, recombined and modified to make them achieve the scale and impact necessary for innovations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0Jon Gertner, author of \u201cThe Idea Factory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Idea Factory<\/a>\u00a0is a history of Bell Labs, spanning six decades from 1920 to 1980. Published a decade ago, the author deliberately focused on the story inside the story. As he laid out his intent, Jon Gertner wrote \u201c\u2026when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offered us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the scholars Gertner likes to reference is\u00a0Clayton Christensen<\/a>. As a professor at Harvard Business School, he coined the term\u00a0\u201c<\/em>disruptive innovation.<\/em>\u201d<\/em>\u00a0The Economist<\/a>\u00a0magazine loved him, labeling him in 2020 \u201cthe most influential\u00a0management\u00a0thinker of his time.\u201d<\/p>\n

A process thinker, Christensen deconstructed innovation,\u00a0exploring<\/a>\u00a0\u201chow waves of technological change can follow predictable patterns.\u201d Others have come along and followed in his steps.<\/p>\n

Identify a technologic advance with a potential functional market niche.<\/p>\n

Promote its appeal as a \u201cmust have\u201d to users.<\/p>\n

Drop the cost.<\/p>\n

Surreptitiously push aside or disadvantage competitors.<\/p>\n

Manage surprises.<\/p>\n

Medical innovations often illustrate all five steps, albeit not necessarily in that order. Consider the X-ray. Its discovery is attributed to\u00a0Friedrich Rontgen\u00a0<\/a>(Roentgen), a mechanical engineering chair of Physics at the University of Wurzburg. It was in a lab at his university that he was exploring the properties of electrically generated cathode rays in 1896.<\/p>\n

He created a glass tube with an aluminum window at one end. He attached electrodes to a spark coil inside the vacuum tube and generated an electrostatic charge. On the outside of the window opening he placed a barium painted piece of cardboard to detect what he believed to be \u201cinvisible rays.\u201d With the charge, he noted a \u201cfaint shimmering\u201d on the cardboard. In the next run, he put a lead sheet behind the window and noted that it had blocked the ray-induced shimmering.<\/p>\n

Not knowing what to call the rays, he designated them with an \u201cX\u201d \u2013 and thus the term\u00a0\u201cX-ray.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>Two weeks later, he convinced his wife to place her hand in the line of fire, and the cardboard behind. The resultant first X-ray image (of her hand) led her to exclaim dramatically,\u00a0\u201cI have seen my death.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0A week later, the image was published under the title \u201cUeber eine neue Art von Strahlen\u201d (On A New Kind of Rays).<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

William II, German Emperor and Prussian King, was so excited, he rushed the physicist and his wife to his castle in Potsdam for a celebrity appearance and lecture on these \u201cinvisible rays.\u201d The\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0was considerably less excited when they reported on January 19, 1896 on the lecture and Roentgen\u2019s \u201calleged discovery of how to photograph the invisible\u201d labeling the scientist \u201ca purveyor of old news.\u201d<\/p>\n

But one week later, on January 26, the paper had a change of heart, writing: \u201cRoentgen\u2019s photographic discovery increasingly monopolizes scientific attention. Already numerous successful applications of it to surgical difficulties are reported from various countries, but perhaps even more striking are the proofs that it will revolutionize methods in many departments of metallurgical industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

By February 4, 1896, the paper was all in, conceding that the \u201cRoentgen Ray\u201d and the photo of wife Anna\u2019s hand had \u201cnothing in common with ordinary photographs.\u201d The following day, the Times used the term \u201cX-rays\u201d but never spoke of it again until\u00a0Roentgen\u2019s death in 1923,<\/a>\u00a0when the Times obituary called it \u201cone of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.\u201d And in 1901 Roentgen received the\u00a0Nobel Prize in Physics<\/a>. Roentgen never sought a patent on his discovery, feeling to do so would be unethical. He donated the\u00a050,000 Swedish krona<\/a>\u00a0prize to the University of Wurzburg.<\/p>\n

And now to the other \u201cXX\u201d in the room. When Musk purchased Twitter, and renamed it \u201cX\u201d, he was focused on political domination not technologic innovation. He financially inserted himself into Trump World for a small (to him) investment of $300 million. In this oligarchal cocoon, he has been fast at work dismantling federal agencies, often with his 4-year old son (also named \u201cX\u201d) on his shoulders. His targets are laced with obvious conflict of interest. For example, the\u00a0NTHSP\u00a0<\/a>(National Highway Traffic Safety Program) in the Department of Transportation (slatted for destruction) has been investigating Tesla\u2019s high rate of auto-pilot fatal accidents; and the end of federal subsidies for widespread electric charging stations benefits Musk financially since Tesla already enjoys a prohibitive lead over his competitors.<\/p>\n

But can Trump and Musk manage the surprises ahead? As\u00a0Erik Brynjolfsson PhD<\/a>\u00a0(MIT), who currently directs Stanford\u2019s\u00a0Digital Economy Lab<\/a>\u00a0and teaches a seminar titled\u00a0\u201cThe AI Awakening: Implications for the Economy and Society,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>likes to preach, innovation that promises increased productivity not infrequently encounters paradoxical blowbacks. These come in many forms. For example, dramatic new chemicals that greatly expand crop yield may also be found to irreparably harm delicate ecosystems that hang by a thread.<\/p>\n

Or more relevant to Musk, powerful social media platforms, like \u201cX\u201d number 1, may be undermined by the very explosion of misinformation, hate messaging and foreign propaganda that they enabled. Just ask Kelly Ann Conway\u2019s daughter,\u00a0Claudia Conway,<\/a>\u00a0how her mother\u2019s unleashing of \u201calternate facts\u201d during Trump\u2019s first term has impacted her family trajectory \u2013 big time blowback.<\/p>\n

Lawless actions by the executive branch have energized city, state, and federal legal practitioners. And Musk\u2019s appearances, with\u00a0\u201cX\u201d number 2<\/a>\u00a0purposefully poised on his shoulders in the Oval Office, drew a special Press introduction this week from the President. \u201cThis is X, and he\u2019s a great guy \u2014 high IQ,\u201d said Trump.\u00a0 All of this has sent Musk approval ratings into the cellar along with Tesla sales in Europe and the U.S. In the\u00a0latest poll of Republicans<\/a>, 3\/4\u2019s do not want Musk to have \u201ca lot of influence\u201d in the Trump administration. And\u00a0Tesla\u00a0<\/a>has experienced its first ever annual sales decline.<\/p>\n

More \u201csurprises\u201d likely lie ahead. As legendary Tech Analyst,\u00a0Kara Swisher,<\/a>\u00a0says the \u201cbromance between Trump, Musk may be doomed by egos: There can only be one.\u201d Denis Cortese MD, former CEO\/President of the Mayo Clinic and Director of ASU\u2019s Center for Healthcare Delivery and Policy, sums it up nicely in responding to this piece: \u201cInnovation can be disruptive. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not innovation\u2026.but it might require innovation in order to recover.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of <\/em>CODE BLUE: Inside America\u2019s Medical Industrial Complex.<\/a><\/em> (Grove\/2020)<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By MIKE MAGEE \u201cThe technological leaps of the 1900s \u2014 microelectronics,\u00a0antibiotics, chemotherapy, liquid-fueled rockets,\u00a0Earth-observing satellites,\u00a0lasers, LED lights, disease-resistant seeds and so forth \u2014 derived from science. But these technologies also spent years being improved, tweaked, recombined and modified to make them achieve the scale and impact necessary for innovations.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Jon Gertner, author of \u201cThe Idea…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}