Innovation At the Intersections: A Conversation With Charlie Feld
16 May 2007
Asking Charlie Feld about innovation is a bit like taking a convertible on a road trip along some great coastal highway. Sure, you could have gone from point A to point B a lot faster by plane. But somewhere along one of the twists in the road that opens up to another spectacular vista, you realized that it’s the journey that is the destination. In fact, it’s those open spaces in between the points of our lives that cause Feld to reflect.
“In a transition period like we’re in,” Feld muses, “you can’t look at any one thing to learn about innovation. The real innovation comes at the intersections, the white spaces, where you combine technology and music and art and travel and come up with an iPod. I mean, why would somebody think of an iPod?”
Feld has been intrigued by the concept of innovation occurring at the intersections between disciplines. The concept was recently examined by Frans Johansson in his book, The Medici Effect. Johansson named this concept after the Medici family of Florence, who, in the fifteenth-century, funded creators from a wide range of disciplines, creating an environment that enabled new ideas to flourish and precipitated the Renaissance, which ripples across Western and modern history.
In his book, Johansson talks about the conditions that answer Feld’s question, “why would somebody think of an iPod?”
Johannson postulates that the intersections or connections between disciplines open up opportunities for new combinations of thinking.
In detailing the phenomenon, he describes the total concept combinations that occur within any one field of music. The example he gives is of classical music and rock music. Students of each genre can combine instruments, structures and vocals to create approximately 2,400 combinations of concepts. But, when classical music and rock music are combined, the combinations of concepts from the two genres combine to create nearly six million new ideas.
“This is the heart of the Medici Effect,” Johannson says. “By breaking down associative barriers and stepping into the intersection between fields, the number of available idea combinations increases beyond anything we can achieve in a single area.”
Feld is interested in the opportunities for innovation that exist in the intersections between disciplines.
“I think the real innovation in the marketplace isn’t going to come from IT infrastructure or networks or self-service kiosks,” Feld says. “It’s going to come when we can see how to fix the health care system. If you look at the health care industry, you’ll see that it is the most de-centralized in the world. You’ve got pockets of information contained separately with doctors, providers, and citizens. The only way you’re going to fix the health care system is to get those different groups together.
“Right now, here in the U.S., when a person shows up at a doctor’s office, they have to get approval from the health care payer. Then, in most developed economies, medical services are provided by specialties in an assembly-line. And every constituent has a different set of information systems and requirements. But when you take that problem of connecting all of the constituencies, and the most important constituency is the one between doctor and patient, you have a challenge of re-creating intimacy.
“If you keep looking at the problem and you don’t get up high enough to understand what’s possible, you’ll never invent an iPod.
“How do you make that connection again on a different basis? It takes a virtual connection to recreate the intimacy. Intimacy requires patients being informed and accountable for their choices, doctors who know the whole history, regardless of their location or specialty, and health care payers that can approve procedures at the point-of-sale, just like we do credit card authorizations when we fill up a tank of gas. In the end, everybody wins if you create the right network.”
The opportunity in this one example is tremendous. According to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, Slowing the Growth of US Health Care Expenditures, the U.S. spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, $2.1 trillion annually, compared with eight to 10 percent in most major industrialized nations. Of that, $230 billion goes for administration costs and another $35 billion is spent on IT.
Feld’s career at EDS has been focused on modernization and creating a standard technology footprint that “industrializes the speed of change.” At first glance, one might think that such standardization would inhibit the opportunities for innovation. In fact, Feld counters, it’s just the opposite.
“Standardization and centralization actually encourage innovation where it matters. Often things that don’t matter enable things and encourage things that do matter. “The more standard and centralized your systems are, the more you can innovate. People think of innovation as thinking of something new. You innovate on the margins but you’ve got to have a platform from which to operate.
“That’s been the challenge within healthcare. There are innovations that occur at the provider level, but sharing them across the spectrum of providers, and enabling the connections that can occur when one doctor can connect with another about a patient’s care, require standardization and centralization of the informational model.”
Feld clearly believes IT has a big role to play in building the intersections and making the connections possible for new ideas to flourish. His concern for the future is ensuring the IT roadbuilders will be there and be ready for the task. There is no doubt in his mind that the industry faces a shortage of talent.
“We have an opportunity within our educational system to make better connection or intersection points. When your kids go to school, they love the games and animation and graphics. They don’t make the connection that it’s computers, math, science and art that makes that possible.
“What we do is we teach math and science in this old, repetitive, 20th century model of reading, writing and arithmetic that doesn’t connect up.
“We’ve got to teach innovation differently in the middle schools and high schools. Combining math, science and art in the Medici-like way is pretty exciting for kids.” It’s clear that Feld is excited about the potential roles IT can play in fostering innovation. The question that remains: who will meet him in the intersection?