Innovation Requires Willingness to Change
Posted: November 18th, 2011 in Innovation
By Megan Portanova 
One of the biggest barriers to innovation we encounter is the unwillingness to change how things have always been done. It is not that surprising to see that mentality in larger corporations, but it’s interesting that this immobility exists in fields that seem to innately require thinking different, like medical research.
Slate is currently running a series called The Mouse Trap, which discusses how using one animal to conduct all sorts of medical testing could be delivering suboptimal results. In the first installment Mark Mattson, Laboratory Chief at the National Institute on Aging and a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins, discussed how laboratory mice are typically overweight and sedentary which can skew research findings – and this is sometimes why treatments that work in laboratory mice don’t actually work in humans. This seemed like a huge issue to me, and one that would require changes throughout the field of medical science in order to ensure that laboratory tests have the appropriate controls, but little has happened. This is due to a combination of researchers’ unwillingness to question all past study results and a lack of resources to change the way mice are raised in labs.
This is not an isolated incident within the medical field. I recently read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, which tells the story of HeLa cells, the first cells that could be replicated quickly and efficiently within laboratories (and thus became the cells used in almost all laboratory tests). The book is an incredibly compelling story about race, socioeconomic class, and medicine, but the part that is relevant to this discussion is the discovery that HeLa cells can contaminate all sorts of samples in labs. This discovery was not met with immediate change in the field, in fact there was some resistance, again because of the implications it had for past results and the lack of resources available.
It is understandable that medical research isn’t quick to make changes, but its evidence of a greater issue that exists today in all fields: an unwillingness both to admit that things have been done sub optimally in the past and to dedicate the resources necessary for change. Companies who want to be truly innovative need to clear this hurdle.