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 systems2,3
- Enhancing free-flowing dialogues, inclusive participation and transparent accountability in ways that cultivate bottom-up, horizontal and top-down organizational synergies4,5
- 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.
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