MIT Technology Review EmTech Talk: Lateral Innovation - from Autism Audiology to Silk Vaccines

I'd like to tell you a story. Actually, a story and two examples of three innovators, each with a lesson you might use for your journey. To begin, I'd like to take you back in time with your imagination. Remember what it was like to be 5 years old? Imagine you're 5 or have a 5-year-old child, the age of laughter and play shouting, crunchy leaves to throw in the air, running through sprinklers, watermelon juice running down your chin, incredible smells, light and color. Now imagine a fortune teller comes to you— okay, that's a witch, I didn't have a fortune teller— and tells you your son won't be enjoying that after all. That he'd be hypersensitive or insensitive to light and color, sound, smell, taste, and touch. That he'll have trouble with social interaction, communication, making friends. That you'll need to spend over $17,000 US a year on special education for autism spectrum disorder. ASD. Lifetime cost: $1.4 million. And a 20% chance he'd have an intellectual disability. Lifetime cost: $2.3 million. In the US, ASD costs are estimated at $11.5 billion a year. The worldwide equivalent would be $265 $1.5 billion. Now suppose it wasn't a fortune teller, it was a doctor who told you, and that if it were diagnosed just a little earlier, before age 5, social skills interventions would have been 90% effective. Now they'll be 11% effective. But never mind, your son has plenty of company. Trouble making friends, but lots of company. Since in the 1970s, only 1 in 2,000 kids were diagnosed. In 2019, 1 in 59. That's over 2 million kids a year, almost 130 million people worldwide. Raffi Rembrandt was that father. He was stunned to find out there's no early diagnosis. Scarcity of effective therapies, and we don't know how ASD actually works. He decided to pursue it and read thousands of studies. As a chemical engineer, he needed to understand what's the problem in order to fix it. Engineers break things apart, find the problem, fix it, and reconnect. One problem he kept running across was speech-in-noise discrimination, the ability to pick out a voice in, for example, a noisy restaurant. While walking one day, it struck him. It might be a chicken-and-egg question. Which comes first? What if signal processing problems are not the effect of ASD? What if it's the cause? Surprising to me, our ears don't just process sound, they make sound called otoacoustic emissions, OAE. When you listen to a seashell, you're actually listening to your own ear making sound in the cochlea. OAE also facilitates tactile, visual, and proprioceptive, or movement sensations. What if you couldn't filter out sound, touch, body position, and movement? How would you feel? What would your developmental years have been like? To test his idea, Ravi put a speaker and a microphone in each ear of a headset, played a sound, and mapped the OAE of children with and without ASD. Here's what he found. Non-ASD listeners had OAE that mimicked the original sound. They could cancel out sounds. ASD listeners did not. Non-ASD listeners produced OAE quickly. ASD listeners did not. And the more severe the ASD, diagnosed behaviorally, the more severe the OAE dysfunction. This is a life changer for over 2 million people a year, 130 million worldwide. The test he developed can be given within a few days of birth, enabling early effective intervention. Raffi filed a patent, co-founded a prize-winning company, SensePD, partnered with hospitals for clinical trials, and plans to offer the test worldwide using a cloud-based big data approach with continually improving analytics. Whether OAE dysfunction is the cause or effect, at least now there's a biomarker for early diagnosis and intervention. Rafi's breakthrough depended on certain things. He was open to his inner passion and calling. No one told him to do this, and he had no research budget or organizational help. He was open to crossing boundaries and going where he didn't belong. He researched ASD from outside the discipline, asking questions others didn't, and his engineering approach was key to the breakthrough. He and his wife collected thousands of research studies across different disciplines. Most people stick to one. He sensed a problem of his child and other people's. Ultimately, he couldn't help his own son, but he could help others. Finally, he integrated audiology and signal processing from his engineering background with ASD diagnostics, a fusion that created radical value. Is Rafi unique? No. I found others a lot like him in my 2-year global study of cross-domain innovators from business, startups, science and technology, and the arts, inventing, social entrepreneurship, and education. They integrated a piece of this and a piece of that, creating billions of dollars of value and tech that could save millions of lives. I call them fusioneers because nuclear fusion produces massive energy from combining two nuclei. Likewise, a fusion in technology, business, and the arts can release a massive amount of value. One example: Livio Valenti. Livio was an economist with United Nations trying to help Cambodia move up the economic value chain. He tried to help them produce higher-value silk and silk products, but in the end, the project failed. He kept exploring what else silk can be used for and stumbled onto the TED Talk of a materials scientist, Dr. Fio Omeneto. Livio met with him and learned that when a fibroin, or silk protein solution, is added to a vaccine, a matrix is formed which protects the biological compounds from thermal and other stresses. They no longer need refrigeration. The economist in Livio loved these advances. Since 2.4 million people a year die from vaccine-preventable diseases, a fifth of the world doesn't receive basic vaccines, 50% of children in some parts. Refrigeration, cold chain distribution, eats up 80% or more of immunization costs. In a US $20 billion global vaccine market, that's $16 billion a year freed up for other uses. Although Livio was getting a master's in public policy at Harvard, he took a class at the B-School, Commercializing Science, and pulled together a diverse team. What started as a business plan for school became award-winning Vaxsys Technologies. Livio is now one of Forbes' 30 Under 30. Like Rafi, Livio's impact depended on certain things. He was open to his inner passion and calling. He could have been a banker like his friends, but wanted to do something more. He was open outward to crossing boundaries. An Italian in Cambodia, a government economist learning about biomaterials and business. He collected people and ideas across nations and disciplines. Then when he sensed an opportunity for big impact, he integrated science and technology, business and government in a powerful way with multinational multidisciplinary team. In fact, doing something within one field, economic development, didn't work. Working across fields is creating radical value. Cross-domain can be hard, though. That brings us to our final example, Carl Mehta. Carl sold his payments processing company to Visa for $240 million US dollars. Founded a VC fund, and found himself always speed learning to attend pitch sessions with new technology and new needs he'd never heard of. Realizing other people need to speed learn too, he founded EdCast, a new AI company that automated what he was doing as a speed learner. But it was built from the, from the user's perspective, not the organization's. Part knowledge management, part L&D, part R&D, part IT infrastructure. There was never a single buyer with a single budget. He figured out he'd have to sell it through the IT infrastructure door and let it walk through the other doors later. Now they have 2 million users and clients include 50 of the Fortune 500. By creating something from the individual's perspective, Carl created a humbug. What's a humbug? Well, when Charles Darwin returned from his adventures identifying species, his grandchildren decided to play a trick on him. They took a piece of one bug and a piece of another and a piece of another and stuck them together and said, "Here, Grandfather, what kind of a bug is this?" He looked at it and said, "It's a humbug." Does this sound familiar? Have any of you created a humbug? What can we learn from Rafi, Livio, and Carl that might help you? Well, first, know your passion and your role. What's the passion that will keep you going? Innovation is harder than it looks. And what's your role? The inventor? The commercializer? The funder? Most people can't do it all. Second, go where you don't belong. You'll bring something totally new to the problems you find. Collect people and ideas across fields, nations, and more. Most people don't. Sense and solve other people's problems. There's big value beyond yourself. Finally, create a fusion. Big value may be there because it's a humbug, but you may need to sell it differently and help your users use it. So whether you're an inventor, commercializer, or VC, whether your fusion helps millions of people, saves $16 billion, or is a humbug, cross boundaries, create fusion, make something big for someone small. Thank you.