Alan Kay recently outlined some of the principles that he thought made Xerox's PARC so successful (if you don't know who Alan Kay is or why PARC was so special, you should try to find out). One was: "'It's baseball,' not 'golf'...Not getting a hit is not failure but the overhead for getting hits." That doesn't quite square with my impression of golf, but I take the point. It's about the price of success. As psychologist Dean Simonton pointed out in Origins of Genius: "The more successes there are, the more failures there are as well." "Quality," he wrote, "is a probabilistic function of quantity." We talk a lot about innovation these days, especially "disruptive innovation." Why not? It sounds cool, it allows people to think they're on the cutting edge, and it often excites investors. But perhaps we've lost sight of what it is supposed to actually be...
Feature Articles
Open Data Projects Win Wellcome Trust, NIH and HHMI Open Science Prize
The Open Science Prize, a new initiative from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Wellcome Trust, encourages and supports open science approaches that generate benefit to society, advance research and spur innovation. An integral component of the selection process is demonstrated use and generation of open data, so PLOS is proud that this year’s winner of the Open Science Prize is PLOS author and evolutionary, computational biologist Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington...
Healthcare Innovation: Think Bigger, Fail Often.
Health Datapalooza 2017 – The Data Revolution Rolls On
The 8th annual Health Datapalooza returns on April 26 – 28 and offers a re-imagined vision of health and health care through the lens of data. In years past, Health Datapalooza has set its sights on health-care startups, apps, big data, electronic health records – you name it – but the main thrust was always more about the business of health care and how tech and data are used to innovate. The annual conference for data geeks, developers, health tech venture capitalists, and start-up wannabes, among others, will this year triangulate around the idea that the patient should be at the center of health care.
HHS IDEA Lab to Host Innovation Day on May 15
Join us for HHS Innovation Day on May 15th at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C., where you’ll experience first-hand how new approaches and creative thinking can advance our work in government. You’ll hear from stellar employees at HHS who are using entrepreneurial methods like design thinking and lean startup to improve how their office or agency delivers on the HHS mission. The day will also feature a panel on deploying creative thinking to improve work in government, and innovative speakers from government and the private sector.
Losing the Doctor Lottery
Donna Jackson Nakazawa's insightful Health Affairs article "How to Win the Doctor Lottery" is, in turn, sad, frightening, wise, and hopeful. She recounts some of her personal travails in finding the right doctors, the ones who will truly listen and become "a partner on my path to healing," and offers several suggestions about what has to happen for us to have more chance to "win." The real question, though, is not how to win the doctor lottery we find ourselves in, but why we're playing it at all. Getting the right doctor is hard. Consider the following: It's easy enough to find out where a physician went to medical school and did their residency. It's not as easy to know what the best medical schools or best teaching hospitals are, other than by reputations (that may or may not be deserved)...
Initiative for Open Citations Making Great Progress
It is enormously satisfying when a good idea captures the imagination and takes off and that’s precisely what happened with the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) over the past 6 months. Citations are the way that researchers communicate how their work builds on and relates to the work of others and they can be used to trace how a discovery spreads and is used by researchers in different disciplines and countries. Creating a truly comprehensive map of scholarship, however, relies on having a curated machine-readable database of citation information, where the provenance of every citation is clear and reusable. With the launch of I4OC that map, and the potential for anyone to use it to explore the scholarly landscape, comes much closer...
Global Coalition Pushes for Unrestricted Sharing of Scholarly Citation Data
This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website: "Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge"...
Clones Welcome in Scientific Hardware
In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open Hardware I review emerging business models for open source hardware. Many of these models are borrowed from the free and open source software industry and will no doubt be familiar to you. However, traditional companies should also take a close look at adding open source hardware to their strategy. One way a company can start the transition to the open source way is to open source a single product to drive sales of its other products. A firm can open source the hardware they sell in order to expand the market of other parts of their product line...
Computational Thinking in Healthcare
OK, you use your smartphone all the time: you use the latest and greatest apps, you can text or tweet with the best of them, you have the knack for selfies, and so on. You probably also have a computer, tablet, and a gaming system, each of which you are also very proficient with. No question: you are a whiz with electronic devices. But, if you're like most of us, you don't really know how or why they work. Maybe that's OK. Most of us don't know how our cars work either, couldn't explain how heavier-than-air flight is possible, have no idea what the periodic table means to our daily lives, and would be in trouble if our lives depending on us making, say, bricks or glass...
Halamka's Cautionary Tale for Healthcare
During my CIO career, I’ve worked on a few Harvard Business School case studies and I’ve had the “joy” of presenting my failures to Harvard Business school students for over a decade. I enjoy telling stories and inevitably the cases I teach are about turning lemons into lemonade. In this post, I’d like to tell a story about a recent experience with Marvin Windows and lessons learned that apply to healthcare...
How the Trump Budget Undercuts Security Risks Posed by Pandemics
President Trump proposed a US$54 billion military budget increase to solidify the security of our nation. However, the government also recognizes pandemic threats as an issue of national security – one that knows no borders. In the last four years, we have faced the Ebola epidemic – contained after significant loss of life – and Zika, which is still not contained. Collectively, we will feel these effects for a generation, while children born with Zika-related defects and their families will feel the effects every day of their lives...
RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe
RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules...
Healthy Soil Is the Real Key to Feeding the World
One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals. When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils.
Developer Opportunities to Code for Good
As I was searching for open source projects that help learners with disabilities, such as blindness or dyslexia, I came across Bookshare. That led me to Bookshare's parent company, Benetech, a technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA which focuses on empowering communities in need. Read more about Benetech in our interview with CEO Jim Fruchterman: Open source product development most effective when social. I reached out and spoke with Anh Bui, Vice President of Benetech Labs, Benetech's new product development arm that explores areas of social need by engaging with communities in the United States and beyond...
Bringing Creative Science to Healthcare, An interview with DesignMap Partner Audrey Crane
Audrey Crane is one of those people who teeter softly on the balance point between the right brain and left brain. Not exclusively a creative, not exclusively a technicalist. One of those people with a healthy splash of both, which play nicely together to facilitate good design work. She’s brought this balance along with her to DesignMap, where she’s now been Partner since the summer of 2010. DesignMap provides high pedigree UX services to major clients, which have recently included Docker, EBay, HP, Aetna, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and others. For Health Technology Forum’s Common Good Innovation Conference at Stanford this May, DesignMap is sponsoring a workshop called the Healthy Aging Challenge...