Skip to main content

How to innovate - Look away from the holes!


During the Second World War, British Royal Air Force faced a serious problem. A lot of fighter planes were being shot down by enemy bullets strafing bottom of the planes. They had a separate division – ORS – Operational research Section - which was working on finding a solution to this problem for about 2 years. 

Why was it so difficult? The solution was to provide an additional layer of enforcement, armor plating, to the bottom of fighter planes. But it came with a limitation. They had a limited amount of armor plating they could add and could not cover entire bottom of the plane with this plating because that much additional weight would affect the performance and agility of the plane. So they had to pick a portion of the area that needed most protection. 

And that was difficult. They had lot of vulnerable areas they had to protect the pilot, the gunners, the ammunition, the fuel, the fuselage, and so on. They had almost given up on finding the ‘sweet spots’ where the coating will be most beneficial. In a final effort to solve the problem, they invited a mathematician, with limited knowledge of how planes function, from a local university to take look at the planes. He examined the planes for about a week and suggested that random-shaped areas on the diagram which he had highlighted are where armor plating should be applied. When probed, why he chose those randomly shape sections, he said none of the planes that he got to examine were hit in the areas he had highlighted. The problem areas were not where the holes were, the problem was where there were no holes. He deduced that planes which got hit in the areas that he had pointed never made back to the base and hence those were the areas that needed to be protected. 

It worked and RAF was able to substantially control the number of planes that were shot down!

There are situations when you should not focus on the problem obsessively. Focusing on the problem will work in most cases (and subject matter experts generally figure those solutions using their expertise and mastery of the subject), but innovative solutions may lie away from the ‘holes’ and that’s where naivety about the subject becomes an advantage and even with little subject matter exertise, an Innovator can come up with Innovative Ideas. 

This story excited me – mainly because of my limited knowledge of the components that contribute to cost of healthcare – reducing the same was the problem which I was hoping to solve **. Now, this story taught me that you don’t always have to be an expert – just look away from the hole.

And that’s what I did and came up with the FSA/ HSA recommender idea. I did not need in-depth healthcare domain knowledge; all I needed was to look away from the holes. And I realized not many were looking away from the holes in a meaningful way. Please check out idea that resulted from going down this path: Lower Members' Healthcare Expenses: “FSA/HSA” Estimator / Recommender tool.

It is yet to be proven how effective this idea will turn out to be (Even though I am confident, very few ideas go as expected). But that’s not the point I am trying make – I am saying, if you want to Innovate - Just look away from the holes!

If you like this story and my idea, and if you have a problem you are struggling to solve – I will be happy to ‘try’ to come up with a solution. It may not always work – but it just may.

There are other approaches to solving problems innovatively – a little more subject matter expertise and applying a successful idea from completely different domain can also work. Check out my BL-Uber idea:

BL-UBER App for Hospital Readmission Reduction and also check out the thought process which I have tried to lay out in this blog post: Healthcare Insurance and Technology (Think UBER) 
   
**I took a 6 week Coursera course to try to bridge knowledge gap and to understand reasons behind rising costs of healthcare. The course helped me understand the big picture and cleared a lot of myths that I had been hearing about rising health care cost, but stopped short of making me an expert of coming up with the ways of reducing our members Healthcare costs (by the way – I still recommend the course to anyone interested in understanding realities of healthcare costs. https://www.coursera.org/course/healthpolicy)  


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#Idea - Improving Member’s Office Visit Experience

What: Make sharing Personal and Insurance details with Doctor’s office hassle free, accurate and ‘paperless’. Constraint: Work with existing infrastructure without requiring additional hardware at Provider’s office.   How: Extend BSC App by building a new functionality that allows sharing of Member’s data with Doctor’s office. Here is how it will work. On BSC app, members will have option to ‘share basic data with provider’. Member chooses this option and a ‘camera’ on the phone is activated. Member asks provider’s clerk to open a webpage (something short like BSCSHARE.COM) BSCSHARE.COM will display a QR Code on Clerk’s screen. Member hands over the phone to the clerk to focus on read the QR code with member’s phone. When the phone reads the QR code, Member’s basic information as insurance details are shown on Clerk’s screen. The clerk can now use this data to update their system (or in a not so ideal situation print the information, prints out the data on...
Post a Comment
Read more

Role of complexity in ‘Keeping it Simple’

" It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." – Albert Einstein It is not simple to ‘keep it simple’. Process of ‘Keeping it simple’ involves complexity. We need to accept that we cannot keep it simple for everyone involved. Simplifying one constituent would almost always make it a bit more complex for others involved.   However, ‘keeping it simple’ can work wonders when we consciously decide to make it simple for constituent that matters. For most Organizations, ‘keeping it simple’ for the ‘consumer’ is a good strategy. Most Organizations get this right, but they also need to understand that making   it simple for consumer would result into a more complex (or at least ‘changed’) business process or operating principles for other constituents. In this age, it will requir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Day in the life of a core member of ‘Collaboration and Innovation Lab’

It is Friday. I arrive at the 50 Beale street office of Blue Shield of California. Instead of going to my desk, I head to the  ‘Collaboration and Innovation Lab’. As I step out of the elevator on 23 rd floor, I think about getting myself something to eat, but my excitement of first going to the ‘ Lab ’ (yes! we call it the Lab ) makes me turn right. As I walk past offices of our ‘C’ team, I get to catch glimpse of beautiful foggy Bay before arriving at the space we call our home for Fridays .   Suddenly, I realize that Friday’s have become even happier than they used to be. As a routine, first thing I do when I step in the Lab is read Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’ painted on the wall. It reminds me every day of what me and all others on the Core team aspire to be. Though what Kipling wants me to be seems ‘ideal’ and ‘unachievable’, remembering how it has made me better, makes me keep trying. After all, the spoils that will come out of this is not what I...
Post a Comment
Read more