www.ScienceTranslationalMedicine.org 20 July 2011 Vol 3 Issue 92 92cm18 1COMMENTARY“ ” THE INNOVATION MANDATEWe appear to have reached a political con-sensus that innovation is the key to “winning the future” (1). Th is focus raises a central question for educators: What is the role of our schools and universities in producing in-novative thinkers and doers? Both in Amer-ica and abroad, universities are experiment-ing with new programs and courses to teach innovation. Within the life sciences, there is particularly strong traction in the area of biomedical technology innovation, in which a number of interesting new training initia-tives are being developed and deployed. In this Commentary, we trace the evolution of these new initiatives toward what we see as an emerging academic discipline.TEACHING INNOVATION IN CONTEXTFor purposes of this discussion, we defi ne innovation as “inventiveness put to use” (2)—that is, discoveries that lead to tech-nologies or services that are taken up in the marketplace. Over the past 20 years, two major streams of educational theory and practice have come together to help moti-vate programs that teach innovation.Th e fi rst is “design thinking” (3, 4). Th e basic premise is that there is a repeat-able process for creating innovative solu-tions that is based on a clear understand-ing of how people experience needs. Th e approach has been most highly developed in the area of product design. Led by high-profi le initiatives at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, and elsewhere, design education programs have been initiated in many universities over the past two decades. In general, these programs have grown up in engineering schools (sometimes in collaboration with art or architecture departments). Th ere is a central emphasis on project-based learning to teach the fundamentals of the opportunity→idea→prototype→test cycle. Typically, these courses are also structured around teams, with a focus on mixing diff er-ent skill sets in the team composition.Th e second major stream is entrepre-neurship education (5, 6). Th e premise is that students from any discipline can ben-efi t from an introduction to the skills and problem-solving approaches used by entre-preneurs. Substantial funding from organi-zations such as the Kauff man Foundation and the National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Alliance (NCIIA) has fueled the growth of programs that teach entrepre-neurship. Th ese programs oft en employ ex-perts from outside of the university, tapping adjunct faculty from the business world to teach courses and mentor students. In general, the emphasis in entrepreneurship classes is on skills and knowledge that are used further downstream in the innovation path from those taught in design classes. Design teaching starts with a need and ends with an idea for a product or service; en-trepreneurship classes start with a product or service and teach the tools necessary to commercialize these ideas.FUELING BIOMEDICAL INNOVATIONWith these two major educational trends providing nourishment, innovation-training programs in the area of medical devices and diagnostics (medtech) are fl ourishing. Th e design methodology of needs fi nding and inventing lends itself well to medtech inno-vation projects; medical device development in particular fi ts beautifully into the brain-storming and rapid-prototyping cycle that is at the heart of a classic design approach. Medtech innovation cries out for interdis-ciplinary team building, mixing physicians, engineers, and business trainees. In fact, team-based training programs in biomedical device design have provided low-hanging fruit for universities that are striving to de-velop genuine collaborations across depart-ments and professional schools.From the standpoint of teaching entre-preneurship, medtech represents an inter-esting and manageable sector to analyze. Th ere is a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem in medtech that has, until just recently, been dominated by U.S. enterprises. Th e system consists of a relatively large number of ven-ture-backed start-up companies with one major path to a fi nancially successful “exit” in mind: ultimate acquisition by a small group of big, multinational companies.Th e fusion of these two favorable envi-ronmental factors has spurred the launch of training programs in biomedical technol-ogy innovation that integrate design think-ing and commercialization into a cohesive process. Th e ad hoc Biomedical Engineering Innovation Design and Entrepreneurship Alliance (BME-IDEA) has a membership of over 100 university programs in North America, most of which have been created in the last decade (7). Th is rapid growth has also been fueled by substantial fi nancial and strategic incen-tives. Beginning in 1989, the Whitaker foun-dation deployed more than $700 million in North America in helping to spawn some 50 new departments of biomedical engineering with a focus on developing technologies for health (8). Importantly, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology re-quires substantial design experience for ac-creditation of undergraduate engineering programs, so that many of these newly cre-ated departments have found it productive to create training programs in biomedical technology design. By the time the Whitaker Foundation came to its sunset in 2006, the Wallace B. Coulter Foundation (9) had begun to supply major new funding for technology transla-tion in biomedical engineering in the form of its Early Career and Translational Re-search Programs. Th e Coulter Foundation has recently endowed fi ve U.S. universities INNOVATIONTeaching Biomedical Technology Innovation as a DisciplinePaul G . Yo c k,1,2,3,4* Todd J. Brinton,1,2,3 Stefanos A. Zenios1,2,4 *Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected] Program in Biodesign, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. 2Department of Bioengi-neering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. 3Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. 4Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. Recently, universities in the United States and abroad have developed dedicated educational programs in life science technology innovation. Here, we discuss the two major streams of educational theory and practice that have informed these programs: design thinking and entrepreneurship education. We make the
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