How Taking A Detour Can Actually Lead To Greater Innovation

[Image: Unsplash User Rodion Kutsaev]

The “father of microsurgery” can teach us a few things about innovation. For one thing, the road to getting there is a journey full of detours, not a straight trajectory.

Back from U.S. Navy service in World War II, a college degree in hand, as well as rejection letters from all 23 of the medical schools to which he had applied, young Julius Jacobson enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a Ph.D. degree in cell physiology. In the lab he stared through a microscope, all day, every day. That daily routine in his career detour would one day have a profound effect on the practice of medicine.

Eventually accepted by Johns Hopkins and earning his medical degree, Jacobson did his surgical residency at Presbyterian Hospital in New York and then took the position of Director of Surgical Research at the University of Vermont.

His first project there, as part of testing a new veterinary drug, was to stop a dog’s nerves from functioning. He realized that the only way to know if all of the nerves had been interrupted was to cut the artery in two and then reconnect it. But he and everyone else in medicine believed that the artery was too small for that.

And then it came to him–look at the artery under a microscope!

The problem was not that the artery was too small to reconnect. The problem was that it was too small to see. This insight, in 1960, launched the field of microvascular surgery. The re-implantation of severed limbs, heart bypass surgery, and a myriad of other surgical procedures became possible.

“And the only reason I had that idea was because I couldn’t get into medical school and had spent so much time in front of a microscope,” Dr. Jacobson says.

Because Jacobson did not take the direct route to medical school, but rather took a detour to the world of cell physiology, he had insight and intuitions that other doctors did not. This intuition, which had become an idea, was transformed into an innovation, and he used it to create value.

We can learn a great deal about innovation from this story:

• It often results from the cross-fertilization of ideas in different fields.
• To have value, it must find its way into the hands of those who can use it.
• It is the solution to a problem or a need.
• It is often serendipitous.

The innovation that will open up the next opportunity for us probably lies just beyond the boundary of what we and our colleagues think we know.

[Photo: Unsplash User Rodion Kutsaev]

Copyright © 2017 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved.

I am an entrepreneur and author. Founder of SHADOKA and other companies. Shadoka enables aspirations to lead, innovate, and transform. Shadoka’s accelerators and solutions bring together the management frameworks, digital platforms, and thought leadership to enable innovation, transformation, entrepreneurship, growth and social impact.

Author of “Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability” (McGraw Hill) and “Survive to Thrive: 27 Practices of Resilient Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Leaders” (Motivational Press). Follow me on Twitter Faisal Hoque. Use the Everything Connects leadership app and Suvvive to Thrive resiliancy app for free.