Innovation—Out of the box thinking!

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”
– William Pollard

Creativity is about divergent thinking. Innovation is about convergent thinking. Creativity is about the generation of ideas and innovation is about putting them into action.

All of us are creative by nature, but we do not innovate or share our knowledge and experience. Ideas have a short half-life. We must act on them before their expiry date. We should always think, “What is our contribution to science, society and surgery?”

A born tinkerer, Tom Fogarty invented his first contraption at the age of 15. Widely known as the automatic centrifugal clutch, it has become a standard for motorcycles and scooters all over the world. As a young scrub technician at a Cincinnati hospital, long before he would himself be qualified to use it, he invented the Fogarty Embolectomy Balloon Catheter using a surgical glove finger tied to a ureteric catheter to “drag” a clot out of a blood vessel. This inflated balloon extraction technique or ‘idea’ transformed a long, highly invasive operation requiring multiple incisions and a lengthy hospital stay into a one-hour procedure done with a single incision under local anaesthesia — thus revolutionizing cardio-vascular surgery into minimally invasive surgery. This was later patented in 1969. Persuing his ambitions and passion for perfection, he became Dr. Thomas Fogarty, the minimally invasive vascular surgery pioneer, teacher, entrepreneur, avid fisherman and even wine vintner. He has 63 patents to his credit e.g. Aortic Stent-Graft for life threatening abdominal aneurysms, Fogarty surgical clips and clamps, Balloon for Laparoscopic hernia repair, Hancock tissue heart valve world’s first porcine valve, etc. Dr. Fogarty has been a past recipient of the “Inventor of the year, 1980” (awarded by San Francisco Patent and Trademark Association) and also of the Lemelson-MIT Prize, 2000 of the amount of $500,000, the largest cash prize in the world for invention and innovation. Dr. Fogarty said, “I have achieved all that I have in my life by focusing on just one basic question: Can it be done better?” He used the Lemelson-MIT Prize money to start the Fogarty Medical foundation to reward clinicians developing innovative medical procedures and devices from all over the world.

Dr. Fogarty, a Stanford University clinical Professor of surgery, author of more than 170 scientific and medical articles, has founded and co-founded over 30 start-up companies that manufacture medical devices. He is currently working on innovations in technology to better address and diagnose obesity and sleep apnoea.
Fogarty provides an exceptional role model to the next generation of physician innovators. We request you to send your innovation-ideas, techniques and instrumentations — so that surgeons at large can be benefited through the next newsletters on innovations.”

Imagination is the key.

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