creative confidence is really two things in almost equal measure. First is just the natural
human ability to come up with a break-through idea. We do think it’s a natural ability;
everybody’s creative they just some people bury it deeper than others. It’s that natural
ability plus the courage to act. What we discovered in
our research is that a lot of people have the first part, they have the ability, but
they’re afraid to raise their hand or they’re reluctant to start prototyping the idea and
so they stop and they hold back and their idea runs down the drain. So you really need
both to have creative confidence. We really like working with people who have
really deep skills, deep technical skills, so whether it’s a doctor or an engineer
or somebody who has that tech – the technical factors are really important to them. So what
we really believe is that they have focused on that kind of to their benefit but they’re
also usually missing the notion of the importance of the human factors when combined with the
technical factors. So you’re really in good shape. We really think there’s kind of three
major areas; the business factors so that you know that something is actually viable
in the marketplace, the technology factors, which are the kind of feasibility, but what
we do is, and what we really care about, is bringing the human factors in to it. With
the technical knowledge you’re at least a third of the way there, right?
What we’ve found is that if we can get technical people to have empathy for the people they’re
designing for it just opens up their world. They are – they’re more motivated, they’re
more inspired, and they get different choices. So often we have a technical person who really
doesn’t want to go out and deal with the messiness of wading in to the actual situation
where the person is going to get the treatment or the person’s going to have to deal with
this highly technical product.
The end result is I guess I, because I’m an engineer, a technical person and by training
I think that they’re particularly empathetic people once it’s turned on. It’s like
a switch that hasn’t been turned on in a while. Once they become empathetic to that
person that they’re trying to help they’re gonna save their life, they’re gonna make
it easier for them to use this device or be more comfortable in the hospital or whatever
I think that motivation is so high that its’ even more motivating than it was when they
were just doing something because it was technically interesting.
Right so it’s not the empathy instead of the technical ability it’s combining the
two. It’s adding on design thinking or creative confidence to the deep technical abilities
that are already there. Many years ago we hired a guy who worked on the early digital
thermometers. You know the ones you put in your ear to see if your kid has a fever or
not. He thought, deeply technical background, and he thought that it was all about precision.
He was trying to get the sensor so they got more digits to the right of the decimal point.
Then he used empathy and he actually went in the field and he talked to moms and he
went to emergency rooms and he realized they don’t need precision. Mom really wants to
know does my kid have no fever; that would be kind of green light. Do they have a little
bit of a fever; a yellow light. And do they have a high fever; a red light. That’s all
she really wants to know. It’s combining that technology with humanity where you really
start to get things right.