Crowdsourcing Ideas About Open Innovation: How Can STFM Raise the Faculty Development Bar Even Higher?

Rick Botelho, MD

All five goals of STFM’s strategic plan address innovation directly or indirectly, to varying degrees. The STFM 2013 Annual Report documents remarkable progress in innovation. Yet, most STFM members have had little or no training in developing innovations during their formal education. Furthermore, STFM’s achievements were made without developing any formal governance policies on open innovation.

Propose Faculty Development Programs on Innovation
Innovation and leadership development are complementary and separate skill sets. We need faculty development programs for both skills sets, so that we can create an academic home to accelerate our organizational development.¹ STFM needs a formalized and structured faculty development process to enhance our capabilities and capacities to develop innovations that build on our significant achievements. What if STFM considered the need for faculty development programs on open innovation to be as important as leadership development?

Foster Open Innovation
Translating this business concept to health care, open innovation involves:

• Creating new processes, methods, programs, services and products through the collaborative and boundary-less exchange of ideas, between silos within and across organizations, communities, networks and systems^2,3
• Enhancing free-flowing dialogues, inclusive participation and transparent accountability in ways that cultivate bottom-up, horizontal and top-down organizational synergies^4,5
• Coordinating a pro-active, comprehensive and ongoing change management process to foster a membership-wide process of creating leadership, administrative, educational, research, and clinical innovations, such as catalytic innovations.

Create Catalytic Innovations
Catalytic innovations are socio-behavioral interventions designed to make large-scale, population health improvements.⁶ These health and healthcare innovations are self-reflective learning and peer coaching processes that are inexpensive, convenient, accessible and widely available for anybody, any time, any place. We need to create radically new ideas to develop effective innovations.^7,8. These innovations promote health, happiness, well-being and healthy habits, prevent diseases, treat mental illnesses, self-manage common illnesses and chronic diseases, and deliver social interventions such as community of solutions ^9,10  and Health Leads.¹¹

Use Digital Learning Resources
The digital learning revolution enhances our capabilities and capacities to foster open innovation and disseminate catalytic innovations—use blended learning methods: workshops, online courses, mobile learning methods, podcasts, webinars, tele-seminars, social media, online platforms for creating learning communities.

Crowd-source Ideas
Please share your ideas and reactions to the following questions.

What about STFM—

• Identifying innovators and aspiring innovators to create an open innovation learning network on the STFM Resource Library wiki organized by the Group on Faculty Development?
• Delivering faculty development programs on open innovation?
• Testing, evaluating, implementing and disseminating innovations?

What if the STFM Board—

• Appointed a Think-tank with the goal of developing a Governance Policy, Steering committee and a Board position on Open Innovation?

Share your ideas on this blog post. Send links of your ideas to your colleagues and ask them to comment on your ideas, and invite them to add more ideas.

If this blog post piques your curiosity, join the STFM Group on Faculty Development. This blog post is based on a draft concept paper on cultivating open innovation health enterprises. Please read, critique, and comment on this concept paper. We have submitted a faculty development preconference workshop proposal on this topic for the 2014 STFM Annual Spring Conference.

Thanks to Jeff Morzinski, PhD, MSW, and the chairs of the Group on Faculty Development, Memoona Hasnain, MD, MPHE, PhD,  Barbara Joyce, PhD, Andrea Pfeifle, EdD, and Joseph Brocato, PhD, Stacy Brungardt, and Traci Nolte for their feedback.

References:

1. Saultz J. An indispensable academic home. Fam Med. May 2013;45(5):359-360.

2. Henry Chesbrough. Rethinks the Concept of Open Innovation. 2011; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbiJ_9W7UHM.

3. Chesbrough H. Insights: Ideas for Change – Open Innovation. 2012; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02tCs3oKovc.

4. Bullinger AC, Rass M, Adamczyk S, Moeslein KM, Sohn S. Open innovation in health care: analysis of an open health platform. Health Policy. May 2012;105(2-3):165-175.

5. Moore A. Innovation. Open your mind to new ideas. The Health service journal. Jun 21 2012;122(6310):34-35.

6. Christensen CM, Baumann H, Ruggles R, Sadtler TM. Disruptive innovation for social change. Harv Bus Rev. Dec 2006;84(12):94-101, 163.

7. Stephen Johnson. Animated film: Where Do Good Ideas Come From. 2010; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU.

8. Johnson S. RSA Talk: Where Do Good Ideas Come From. 2010; http://www.thersa.org/events/video/vision-videos/where-do-good-ideas-come-from.

9. Stange KC. In this issue: from communities of solution to joy. Ann Fam Med. May-Jun 2012;10(3):194-195.

10. Communities of solution: the Folsom Report revisited. Ann Fam Med. May-Jun 2012;10(3):250-260.

11. Rebecca Onie. What if our healthcare system kept us healthy? 2012; http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_onie_what_if_our_healthcare_system_kept_us_healthy.html.