First of all, for those of you reading this at BIO 2018 in Boston—welcome! It’s a pleasure to have you onsite. It’s important to note that innovations across segments of our industry don’t happen without thought exchanges between members—hence the importance of meetings like this.

Having been an advisory board member and a chairman for many events such as this, I can tell you it’s not easy to come up with ideas and to develop the schedules and logistics for everything that will transpire at the event.

In looking at the week-at-a-glance brief for this year’s BIO, there are 14 instances of the word ‘patient’ appearing. This of course implies that much of the sessions will (or should) include substantial talk-time on how our current developments influence patient care, access, and resolution of disability and disease.

There are two issues I see here with the schedule as it’s intended and how it plays out:

1. With FDA and other regulatory inspectorate representatives onsite as usual, speakers and discussants tend to be more guarded with their thoughts and feelings for fear that it will tie back to their parent organization, complete with reprisal. This is rooted in the psychology of authority, and the resultant feelings of disempowerment and submission. Whether or not you think it can happen, it does, and can be very subtle and insidious (read: can shape your opinions and behaviors to fall in line with the group).
2. The risk of “me-too” thinking is very high. It’s comfortable to rehash the same issues and thoughts within a peer group, which tends to produce the same outputs as we’ve always had. Which brings me to the solution to this: What do Robin Roberts and Diana Ross have to do with biomedical innovation?

This year, helping to highlight the event will be several luminaries across different fields. This is an important aspect to the success and influential power of the conference: make sure you don’t miss them.

You get insight into how our current and future therapies do and will influence the public, and at the same time, it gives you a chance to get your brain thinking on a different track. The risk of big events like this is that everyone tries to upstage everyone else in the selected themes of the gathering, and that leads to tremendous pockets of groupthink.

Some of the most innovative and famous thinkers in human history have engaged in very non-scientific endeavors to give their brains downtime to subconsciously process and shift gears.

Albert Einstein used to play his violin as often as he could to get his mind off of physics and astronomy, saying, “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know I get most joy in life out of my violin.”

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Laureate, would play bongo drums, presumably for much the same relief from high cognitive output.

When Gottfried Liebniz thought about what was important, he said, “Love is to seek happiness in the happiness of others,” and, “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.”*

So instead of succumbing to the comfortable and natural manifestations of human behavior in settings like this (i.e., gathering in small groups with your known colleagues, talking about the usual industry-related topics), instead take advantage of the other sessions and keynotes with orthogonal topics. Go hear someone opining about patient access problems, hear about the news media’s recent conundrums with whatever they are concerned about. Go see Diana Ross perform. During this break from your ‘usual mode’ of cogitating, you may just make some cognitive connections between topics that you hadn’t thought of before. That’s how innovation happens. 

*It should be noted, by the way, there are two camps in the world of calculus—those who think Liebniz invented calculus, and those who believe that Isaac Newton was the first. They’re both long gone, and the ideas and dating are ambiguous to some extent, but I will tell you that the integral symbol (this ∫) was developed by Liebniz, for what it’s worth.

For fun on your way home from BIO, you can try to use an integral to determine a popular and annoying HR interview question (as was used at Google in the past): How many golf balls would fit inside an airliner?

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Ben Locwin

Ben Locwin, PhD, MBA, MS, MBB, is an international healthcare speaker, has been a long-time advocate for evidence-based medicine, and has advised and guided vaccine manufacturers, global immunization committees, and vaccine congresses on best scientific practice and principles for vaccine composition and schedules.