Chapter 03: A View of Innovation Rooted in Personal Experience
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Description
In this chapter, Ms. Kaul talks about more about her view of innovation, noting that her father shaped her perspective.
She begins by sharing his lesson that “if the crowd is with you, you’re probably not thinking ahead” and that it’s important to be future oriented, seeing “today as a jumping off point.” She explains the challenges of educating individuals about this new role, which is focused on “designing tomorrow.” She talks about difficulties in documenting the contribution of an innovation officer.
Identifier
KaulR_01_20160224_C03
Publication Date
2-24-2016
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Overview Finance, Entrepreneur, Biotechnology; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Working Environment; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
R. Kaul, MBA:
Right. So the one lesson I learned from my dad is, in sort of thinking about innovation, that if the crowd is with you, if everybody is in vast agreement, and nodding their head, you're probably not thinking far enough ahead -- that innovating, creating new companies, new ideas, new paradigms is a lonely place. And, but that's the nature of the business, is, pushing the envelope is uncomfortable for most people. And so if everybody's comfortable, then you might want to reconsider whether you're truly pushing the envelope. Because innovation, by its very nature, is disruptive.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
That's nice. Well, I mean, it's an interesting idea of what innovation is. I don't think people understand, because what I think about that particular quote is that it adds -- it puts in the fear factor. I mean, why is it that people resist it? Why is it that people don't -- they shut their ears, they'll stick their fingers in their ears, la la la, I don't want to hear it, because there is disruption. And if we start the down the road of thinking in this way, how we do business, how we interact with each other, how we think of ourselves -- I mean, all of that has to -- is sort of up for grabs.
R. Kaul, MBA:
The other thing is, it threatens people because if you're truly doing something innovative, it requires a big change. And you have to change the way you're doing business. You have to change what you're doing, or change your operation or change the way you're managing the clinical setting -- whatever it is, if it's sufficiently innovative, it's going to be disruptive, it's going to require a change and it's going to require an acknowledgment that what you're doing today isn't the best way to do it. It may have been the best way, to your knowledge. But you always have to be thinking about, how can I do it better tomorrow? You have to always go on the underlying assumption that today is just a jumping off point, today isn't the end point. And that makes people uncomfortable. People have pride in what they're doing today, and they should. There isn't anything wrong with what you're doing today. But there is always room to improve.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I noticed that when I'm interviewing people, and lessons learned and things like that, and I've learned that for me, a good way is to say, I understand nobody sets out to be inefficient.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Nobody gets up one morning and says, "Today I'm going to design a really inefficient way of doing things."
R. Kaul, MBA:
Right.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
They get that way. And they get that way for specific reasons. And so the challenge is looking at what that is all about.
R. Kaul, MBA:
And also developing something innovative takes time, and takes iteration. And in a setting like this, it's over and above someone's daytime job. It's saying, I need you to do everything you're doing today and get it done, and I need you to contribute to designing the future. Well, how am I supposed to get everything done today and design the future, when designing the future, and doing the future right is also a full-time job? That's why innovation in the last probably five years has become a full-time job. This didn't used to be a job, right? And I think a lot of people, when this job first got created, I'm not speaking specifically about MD Anderson, I'm just speaking about the industry at large when the notion of innovation officers started popping up, the question becomes why. Because a lot of people, if you asked them, would argue that they're doing innovative things; they want to say, "No, no, no, why do we need an innovation officer, when I'm innovative?" Being innovative is hard. Being innovative, trying to invent new things in the future is as hard, if not harder, than maintaining the existing operation, right? It's a full-time job. It's not something you can do in your spare time. It's a discipline. It takes focus, it takes iteration. It takes constant -- it takes a different kind of culture of change. You can't be distracted by today while you're trying to design tomorrow, because today is always going to take priority over tomorrow. One of the great things about the role of an innovation office is you have the luxury of not being distracted by the today, because you don't have operational responsibility. So if you're always -- if you're running an existing operation, then you're dealing with the latest fire. And you're living in the context of the today. And it's hard to get out of that context, when you're living day in and day out. It's easy to come in as an observer outside the context as a fresh pair of eyes to see it clearly, and I think that's how, how this role evolved in most institutions, which is way -- we're never going to get to tomorrow if someone actually isn't focused on figuring out what tomorrow looks like. What's hard for innovation officers in general is that's a really lofty goal. And when you don't have operational responsibility and you have this lofty goal of trying to move the institution into the future, most people say, "What have you done for me lately," especially when it comes down to budget time. And it's hard for an innovation officer who has no operational responsibility to justify what have you done for me lately. So I think that that's -- that that becomes my philosophy on dealing with that, if you don't live in a progressive organization that gets what it takes to innovate, which most people don't, then you're doing what I would consider non-innovative, useful projects to establish credibility. So it's useful to the organization, is it something that I would think that if you asked me my honest opinion is innovative, is transformative -- not particularly. But you have to create those, positive distractions along the way to buy yourself time to actually get to the real business of innovation, because the real business of innovation isn't going to happen tomorrow. So...
Recommended Citation
Kaul, Rebecca MBA and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 03: A View of Innovation Rooted in Personal Experience" (2016). Interview Chapters. 1262.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1262
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