Fail Early Fail Often

Karen Coppock and I had lunch with two senior executives from Philips Electronics yesterday. We had an interesting discussion about technology innovation in the health care sector, particularly the potential to lower health care costs. Philips has devoted a lot of effort to inventing technology solutions that might help patients take their medications more regularly. Nearly every solution they came up with worked for some but not most people. Nothing could compare to advice from nurses. The result of this learning process? Philips now devotes its attention to helping nurses do a better job of scheduling and getting their work done. That result might seem obvious but Philips had never intended to help nurses, and only learned about this opportunity by failing at helping patients.