The trap of "servant robots" in innovation

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – whether Henry Ford actually said that or not, this adage accurately describes both innovative thinking and a flaw that many of us have when thinking about innovation.

The flaw is to always think in incremental changes as opposed to conceptual changes. People in the 50s imagined that robots would do our chores as we would do them, by hand. It turns out that washing dishes is more efficiently done in a compact machine, sweeping through a vacuum on wheels and ironing by a chemical in out detergent.

When thinking about innovation in healthcare, we must avoid the same trap – healthcare is going to look very different in 5 years, we need to design for the extended timeline, not merely improving the process today.

Case in point, have you seen the Patient Room 2020, from NXT Health? It was designed in 2013 with an eye on 2020. This solution is an example of a "faster horse" because the designers made an errouneus assumption that in-patient care would be the same in 2020 as it was in 2013. It's not. In fact we are seeing a trend of providers moving more and more services to out-patient basis, making this design largely irrelevant.

How do we avoid this trap? We need to start thinking "where the puck is going" and be there with the solution, we need to solve for the future, not present. Neither Steve Jobs nor Elon Musk have used market research or surveys to determine roadmaps for their products, they could see where their industries where going and created that future.

In short? Hire a millenial and let them tell you what they do.