Innovation Budhi

Buddhism comes from "budhi", to awaken. Likewise, those who preach the gospel of innovation are asking us to open our minds to ?a higher level of creative consciousness in an effort to deliver more value to end users. The practices are somewhat similar in that they challenge each individual to be introspective and focus on practices that lead to improvements as a person and as an innovator.

Biomedical and health entrepreneurs evolve in several stages.

At first, they are technicians, charged with practicing and perfecting the tools of their arts. Medicine and science are challenging, difficult and constantly evolving with massive amounts of new information every day. Staying abreast and practicing state of the art care is a big enough challenge for most.?

Some go to the next level as managers and try to use their skills to maximize and optimize outputs per unit input. The idea is to use scarce resources to their best use and be the most effective and efficient. Innovation might be incremental, particularly when it comes to process improvement, but usually culture and forces maintaining the status quo are formable opponents of substantial change.

A few become leaders, offering vision, direction and inspiration. They are primarily agents of change. They pick which wars to fight and have a strategy for winning them.

Those with an?entrepreneurial mindset take the change process to the next stage.?The entrepreneurial mindset is a state of mind interested in the pursuit of opportunity with scarce, uncontrolled resources. The goal is to create user defined value at various multiples of the existing competitive offering through the deployment of innovation.

And then there are those scarce few with an entrepreneurial mindset who are true innovators. Many have described their traits and qualities, but, at their core, they do things that result ?in new things or doing things in a new way that results in products, services or processes that deliver value at a substantially increased multiple of the competitive offerings. In many instances, they create something that has never been done before, thus not tinkering with the existing model, but rather, making the existing model obsolete.

Evolving to a higher level of innovation consciousness takes a lifetime. It challenges those willing to take the journey and demands daily practice and an acceptance of our inner foibles and human faults. For some, the moment of light might come sitting under a tree. For most of us, though, it will take a much different path.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack