America loves innovation. We prize creativity. We honor inventors. We are the nation of Thomas Edison, Henry
Ford, Jonas Salk, Steve Jobs, and Stephen Spielberg, to name a few luminaries. Silicon
Valley is the center of the tech world, Hollywood sets the cultural tone for
the world, Wall Street is preeminent in the financial world. Our
intellectual property protection for all that innovation is the envy of the
world.
But, as it turns out, maybe not so much. If there’s any doubt, just look at our healthcare system.
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Matt Richtel writes in The New York Times “We
Have a Creativity Problem.” He reports
on research
from Katz, et. alia that analyzes not just what we say about creative
people, but our implicit impressions and biases about them. Long story short, we may say people are
creative but that doesn’t mean we like them or would want to hire them, and how
creative we think they are depends on what they are creative about.
“People actually have
strong associations between the concept of creativity and other negative
associations like vomit and poison,” Jack Goncalo, a business professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the lead author on the new study,
told Mr. Richtel.
Vomit and poison?
You’ve been there. You’ve seen that. You’re probably blocked a few creative ideas
yourself.
The 2012 research
pointed out: “Our findings imply a deep irony.
Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and
generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also
makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most. Moreover, “people may be
reluctant to admit that they do not want creativity; hence, the bias against
creativity may be particularly slippery to diagnose.”
In the new study,
participants were given two identical descriptions of a potential job
candidate, except that one of the candidates had demonstrated creativity in
designing running shoes, but the other in designing sex toys (the researchers note:
“the
pornography industry plays a significant role in the refinement,
commercialization, and broad dissemination of innovative new technologies”). The
participants explicitly rated the latter candidate as less creative, although
their implicit ratings showed equal ratings.
The researchers concluded:
Collectively, the findings strongly support our contention that implicit impressions of creativity can readily form, be differentiated from a traditional explicit measure, and uniquely predict downstream judgment, such as hiring decisions, that might be relevant in an organizational context.
This matters, they say, because: “the findings of
study 4 seem to square with real world examples of highly creative people who
were ignored until well after their death because their work was too
controversial in its time to be recognized as a creative contribution…”
Umm, anyone remember Ignaz
Semmelweis?
As the researchers warn: “The results of study 4
merely hint at the possibilities that await in many other embarrassing,
stigmatized, or controversial domains within in which people might choose to do
their most creative work but that their peers (and creativity researchers)
might fear to tread.”
E.g., if you’ve done your creative work in the health
insurance space, that doesn’t necessarily buy you much credibility in the rest
of the health care world – or if you’ve demonstrated your creativity in health
tech, the rest of the tech world may still doubt your skills.
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Well, at least our patent system, which protects intellectual property and helps fosters innovation, works, right? It fosters and incents innovation, doesn’t it? Again, not so much. A New York Times editorial charges: “The United States Patent and Trademark Office is in dire need of reform.” In the current Patent Office system, the Editorial Board asserts, “not only is legal trickery rewarded and the public’s interest overlooked, but also innovation — the very thing that patents were meant to foster — is undermined.”
If there’s any doubt, just
look at the price
of insulin, which has been propped up by patent “innovations” that keep its
price high after a hundred years. “When
it comes to protecting a drug monopoly,” The Times says, not limiting
those monopolies to insulin, “it seems no modification is too small.” 
Credit: USPTO
The Patent Office, The
Times suggests, needs to ensure that inventions are “truly novel and
nonobvious, it must be described in enough detail for a reasonably qualified
person to build and use it, and it must actually work.” It also needs to challenge “bad patents,”
such as those from so-called patent trolls, which exist not to innovate but to
extort money from actual innovators.
The U.S. is still, by
far, the leader in patents granted,
but not in scientific
research papers or R&D
spending per capita/% of GDP, which makes one wonder what all those patents
are for.
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Healthcare desperately needs innovation. No one can dispute that; not anyone working
in it, not anyone receiving care from it, not anyone who has had any exposure
to it. But healthcare also has a lot of
middle managers, and middlemen, and, as Professor Mueller said, “Novel ideas have almost no upside for a
middle manager.”
Right now, healthcare
thinks that EHRs and digital health – whatever that might actually be -- qualify
as innovation. That’s enough, it believes;
those are forcing change in ways and at a pace healthcare is not used to and is
not comfortable with.
Too bad.
It has been said that if your company has an
innovation department, it’s not innovative. If it has middle managers deciding
which novel ideas get pursued, don’t expect real innovation. If it is ruling out hiring people who worked
on unusual projects (think sex toys), it’s rejecting creativity.
Your biases against creativity may (not) be showing.
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