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Reuben Mezrich, MD, PhD, FACR The goal of all of us involved in research is finding new ideas, making new discoveries and then developing them into practical products or processes. I was fortunate early in my career to work in one of many laboratories that existed “once upon a time” for just that purpose. The main job of the members of the technical staff was to invent and innovate. The main job of the administration was to provide the resources and the environment in which we could do this job. The main tool that the administration used to support our efforts at innovation was the “Quick Kill”. The underlying understanding was that most new ideas failed. At the RCA Labs the expectation was that 80% of all ideas would fail and the administration would manage to that expectation. If in any year more than 80% of new ideas failed they were being too aggressive, if less than 80% failed they were not being aggressive enough. The “Quick Kill” was used to weed out the failures. Twice each year we would all gather together for an award ceremony where those ideas that hadn’t quite made it were celebrated – nice plaques were distributed – but these were known as the “kiss of death” awards. The project was terminated, but no one was fired. The next morning the boss would ask…”what’s your new idea”. The sin was not failing, the only sin was not having new ideas. Among the many ideas that came out of the Labs was color television, the LCD display, the CMOS transistor and on and on. The environment at the Labs was an effective stimulant to innovation. Unfortunately we now live in an environment, especially in government funded research, where failure isn’t tolerated. All research, almost by design, must succeed, but such research, almost by definition, will not be innovative, and in fact won’t achieve the goals most of us really want. I will review this situation and then try to illustrate, by example, what we are doing at the University of Maryland Department of Radiology to stimulate innovation. |