Navigating Healthcare Innovation: Challenges, Strategies, and Breakthroughs with Robert Klupacs

In a lot of cases, the success of a drug was how the patient's going to react. And so talking to patients rather than the doctors was something that we never used to do a lot of. That's really important. And similarly, if you're developing something for ICU, you know, doctors don't have very much to do with patients in ICU. It's the nurses who have got insights that can make or break a product. We want to always deal with la professa, but many times it's the person at the coalface who is going to use your product that's They're going to tell you what they want, and if it's not built into it, they'll go somewhere else.

Yeah.

That to me has been the biggest learning in my 40 years.

Robert Klipax, welcome to the Mentor List.

Thanks very much, David.

Well, it's great to have a fellow podcaster in in the studio today.

I'm thinking you're bigger than me, David, somewhat.

Well, and you've got you're in the hot seat today, so a bit of maybe a different experience. You've had experience what interview guests are going through on your show.

Oh my God!

But no, thank you for coming. It's also great to have a mastermind or mentor list member as well. So Robert. CEO of the Bionics Institute. We've, uh, we had a pre-briefing call and we thought, gosh, we could take this in so many different ways. But the overarching theme we thought was around cultivating innovation. So, um, comes up in a lot of our mastermind sessions, you know, we need to be more innovative, we need to be more creative, we need to have a culture of innovation. This, these words that sort of seem like a really good idea. Um, you're in the business of innovation, I, I could say, to sort of to label you in some ways. So maybe what is innovation to you?

That's a really good question, and thanks for asking the hard one first.

Get straight in.

I mean, we've all lived in Australia, and you think about what some of the great things have come out of Australia, you know, the stump jump plough, wireless, the cochlear implant, which is part of my institute, some of the other things that have come out. Innovation is basically identifying unique solutions to known problems. And most of the time, that's how it comes about. No one sets out to say, I'm going to innovate for innovate's sake. They've usually got a reason to do it. The challenge is, you know, problems can be very small or very big, and sometimes the solutions can be very small or very big. But in the field that I've always worked in, technology, health technology in particular, that usually means you've got to have a drug Or you've got to have a device. And that takes a long time and usually it's quite complex. But the broader question you ask about innovation, you know, we do it every day, you know, even at home. You know, how do we turn— something happens, we can't turn the light switch on or something like that. How do we come up with a solution?

Yeah.

How do we trick our kids to eat their vegetables? Sometimes that's being innovative. And people often think it's something quite complex when in fact it is quite simple. It's about sometimes thinking outside the square and coming up with something that no one else has thought about. Doesn't necessarily have to be super smart, but it needs to be something new. And many times those things are not scalable, but they're useful. But in many other times, they are extremely useful. And then the challenge is, how do you turn it into something that's of scale? And that's, that's something that I think Australians haven't quite grasped. We're very innovative as a culture.

Right.

We take— we make lots of discoveries. But the commonality of the Australian innovation sector is we don't do a great job of taking all that education that we've been giving to our people, our basic culture of innovation, coming up with solutions to problems, but then turning into something which could lead to major economic impact or better, in my case, health outcomes. Because we've never really been great at translating, you know, the story of Australia, you know, dig it out of the ground and sell it to the rest of the world. And we do that extremely well. And I know there's always the economic argument about not investing to add value to it, but that's about innovation really. Could you imagine if you could create something brand new with our basic resource of iron ore, for example? We led the world in steelmaking. Perhaps we can't, but that's an example.

Yeah.

Of using innovation to play to our strengths. And I use a pitch talk, and you and I have discussed this before at the Mentor List, you know, the innovation statements it puts out every year. Australia is the most highly educated group of people in the world per head of population, um, incredibly smart. We've got natural advantages, and you would think with all that we should be leading the world Like the Scandinavians do or the Koreans do. And yet our ability to translate all that knowledge and all that innovation is pretty poor. And that's been my passion for the last 40 years, is try to help people.

And to take it globally.

Take it globally, yeah.

I mean, yourself aside, yeah, it's not that often that we do end up with global superpowers coming from here. It's the exception, not the norm. And one of the things you just You mentioned, Robert, which I'd like to maybe throw around a little bit, you mentioned the problem can be very big or very small. And given sort of the role that you're in founding many different companies and I guess structures to deal, is it a problem that you're starting with or is it a, like how do you go from getting someone to believe in you, invest in you and then take on a problem? project? Like how— I don't know.

Yeah, but well, it's a challenge. I mean, sometimes, as I mean the great expression we always— sometimes it's easier to sell the sizzle than the steak.

Yeah.

So sometimes, um, you need someone who really wants the solution. So in my, in my area, for example, you're dealing with lots of people unfortunately who possibly have got disease in their family. and there's no cure for them, or there's very little that can be done. They're talking to all the doctors and they give us a phone call. Look, is there anything you can do? And they're, they're very enlightened to possibly say, look, we think you might be able to help us. Here's a bit of money, have a go. That's one extreme. The other one is, you know, you talk to lots of doctors or nurses or people in that healthcare field where we come from And they're saying, here's the problem we face all the time, which is in many cases it's not the drugs. It's a practical thing. We can't deliver the drug very well, or the patient is at home. They've got to come in for 2 hours to get the treatment and go home. Those are all sources of innovation. And for us, in my particular place where I work at the moment, we get to talk to lots of people at the healthcare coalface. And they tell us all the things that are going wrong or things that they would like to improve. And because primarily I work with lots of engineers, engineers love to build things.

Yeah.

And if they can get an idea about something that they need to create, they will. The challenge for me is to make sure that we get that flow of information from the healthcare sector to say, well, this is where the gaps are. And then it's my guys' creativity to come up with something. Usually you can do that pretty quickly to come up with a very, very early prototype. The challenge then is if it starts to work, then you need real big money usually.

Because that sounds pretty dynamic, like, or iterative. Like, um, you know, I just had a preconceived, obviously wrong picture in my head that, okay, Robert, this is the problem, go and fix it. And then you've got some engineers or Well-trained technicians working in a lab. In some ways I was thinking isolation, but now you're talking about going chatting and/or identifying trends in the hospitals with GPs or whoever's at the coal front.

Well, the best example possibly for us that we had in my time at the Institute, we've developed a new system for epilepsy seizure monitoring. And the problem there was we work with one of the world's leading epilepsy physicians, Professor Mark Cook. And for a very long time, he'd known and frustrated as a doctor. He'd have patients come to him, and the way people with epilepsy record their seizures, they keep a notebook.

Right.

And he just intuitively thought, this is wrong, because I'm seeing all these things, I give them tablets, but I'm not sure they're right. So he came up, worked with a company 15 years ago who had a first idea of monitoring brain activity, but they would take a device and have to put it into the brain. the brain and monitor activity. And they did that. It was probably never going to be a product, although they thought it was. But the data they got out of that showed that when they compared those 15 patients', um, recorded seizures with the actual seizures they could see by having an implant in the brain, there was a huge disconnect. And what Mark realized was the whole field of epilepsy treatment, where I can give you a drug to reduce your seizures, is based on what you're telling me. And most of the time what you're telling me is wrong. How do I overcome that? And then the problem in the system is that if you've got early diagnosis with epilepsy, they'll ask you to go into a hospital for 3 to 5 days and turn lights off and have noise and keep you awake to try to induce seizures to work out whether you can do it. But the maximum they could do that was for 3 to 7 days, and that didn't work many times. So Mark had this problem. I know that if I could have access to long-term patient data, personalized data from a person, I could see their real events. I could then tailor therapy and I could get much better results. So his problem was, I need to develop long-term brain monitoring in a way that's not too invasive that people would want to do. And so that was his problem. His solution was, he knew a fair bit about the cochlear implant technology. He needed some engineering capability to put electrodes that could be put just above the scalp to be able to monitor it. And we spent with him 5 years developing a new system of electrodes that could be added to a cochlear implant that could be implanted into someone's head. And that was that iterative process about how do you design it surgically so they can be implanted, it can be robust, it can be safe. it could be sensitive enough to pick things up. That process, from first concept, which is drawn up on a bit of paper, to the final design that got manufactured, was 24 iterations.

Hmm.

It got made, got tested, got tested on the bench, got tested in animals, had to be built, and then we had to get it through the regulatory authorities to do clinical trials. And subsequently, now 20 patients have been implanted. The results are extraordinary. But that whole process of engineers being interacting with the doctor has all started. And even then, it took 4 years to get it to the conceptual stage, and then another 3 years to do the first clinical studies. But now it's on the path, and we think it will make an enormous difference. But that only happened because Mark Cook had this problem that he didn't think anyone could solve. And he needed to be introduced to the right people, i.e., engineers, and also with an understanding of other technologies, e.g., the cochlear implant, that could be all brought together.

Yeah.

And then once we started, well, then we had to get surgeons involved, because if we couldn't design it in a way that surgeons could very easily put into a patient, it wasn't going to work as well. So it started with a physician engineer. It then morphed into getting neurosurgeons involved. And then we've now had to build a whole team out around the country and around the world to actually get that through clinical trials. And that's still just beginning the process. But that's a great example of a healthcare physician coming up with a problem. And there's many like that that we've got.

Yeah. And so in that scenario, they've come to you because they know that you can incubate and they can drive through that process. And you mentioned the R word, regulators, which I didn't think we'd have the R word coming out when we're talking about innovation, but I guess nothing would get to market without Well, that's proper.

Yeah. Well, in a lot of cases in the fields that we work in innovation, it's not a regulatory requirement. There's fast-moving consumer goods. There's lots of innovation happening super rapidly in the product lifecycle, 6 to 9 months. So constant innovation to have that edge. But when you're working in the healthcare sector, clearly it's a very highly regulated area. It needs to be safe, it needs to be efficacious, it needs to be manufacturable. And you're not going to put something into a human being that a regulator says is going to hurt someone. So you need to be manufacturing these things to a much higher standard and you need to be generating a lot of data and support. And that's why it becomes very expensive and very long-term, but it's also why it can make a lot of money because the high regulation creates a very large barrier to competition if you're ahead of the curve.

And speaking of maybe Being ahead of the curve, it sounds like Australia is well positioned. You mentioned we're highly educated, most— we're the most highly educated population in the world per capita.

That's right.

So we're not a Silicon Valley. Health, medical, we seem to be batting above our average in terms of other industries. These are my— you can correct me if I'm wrong, Robert, but—

I think from a discovery perspective, we do.

Right.

And if you look at the scientific literature, you know, the publications by academics in particular, we rank in the top 5 or 10 countries in the world for publications of science. You know, another measure they use is how often that science is cited. And we rank in the top 10 again across a number of fields, not just healthcare. Quantum science in particular is something that we lead the world in. Mining and metallurgy, we're the same. Agriculture, we're the same. So it's really common. What we're really poor on though is then taking that discovery, having published the mechanisms of that in a paper for others to play with. Often what we do is we give people an opportunity to springboard from our discovery and then we can't catch them because people have been looking for a lot of these insights.

Mm-hmm.

They're now published. Then larger groups around the world can read what we've done. And this has happened many times in my career where you work with a group of people, they've published a seminal finding, they haven't protected it or haven't protected it well enough. They haven't been able to build on what they've got because they haven't got enough money. A group in the United States or a group in Japan or a group in Europe reads that paper, said, oh, that's what it was. They then throw a whole team at it, and very quickly they've moved way past where we were. And so while we may have had intellectual property around it, very quickly they've made improvements to what we originally had. So that's the challenge for Australia. We're very good at discovery, very poor at that next stage of incubation and adding value to it to get that higher level of protection. And of course, a great example which has worked in the positive though, is if you think of the wireless technology of CSIRO, I mean, they led the world in that. They filed the patents on it, and for a very long time people were copying them, and they took them on. They had great intellectual property, and in the end everyone pays CSIRO royalties. But that took a long time. And one argument sometimes we hear is, why couldn't Australia dominate the wireless industry? Well, they needed to make the concept, they protected it, then they needed other people to develop applications, and that's what's happened. Sometimes we— because we don't add enough to the discovery, and you don't necessarily always need to add a lot to it, but because we don't add enough, we allow our competitors to get ahead. And we're basically at giving ourselves— giving our competitors a break, unfortunately, David. And that's my frustration, because most of the government money that goes to support research, the NHMRC, the Australian Research Council, is at that very early stage. That next stage of money that takes it from concept through to proof of principle, the so-called— what we call the valley of death. There's very little government money for that. That's usually seed capital or venture capital or industry. And in Australia, the industrial R&D investment is very low compared to the rest of the world.

Right.

And so we haven't done very well there. And there's no government money at government level to support that proof of principle. And so We publish early, we hope we can get it away, we often can't. The information's published and then larger groups around the world can either consolidate it with what they've already known, or they can take it and, and modify it and actually create the products that we could have done ourselves. That's the frustration for Australia. I think people are now realizing that and knowing that's the problem, but we haven't really come up with a solution because There's still not enough money coming in from industrial R&D, either from philanthropy or industrial organizations to back it. And government, as you know, talks about it, but it's not really government's job to be a developer of technology. That should be industry. And that's, that's what makes us different, I think, to the Northern Hemisphere. You've got a whole culture of industry taking early-stage things and building it. You know, our bigger companies here, because we're Either oligopolies or monopolies by and large don't need to invest hugely to keep the competitive edge. And I think that's the thing that holds us back.

Yeah, interesting. So R&D, so industrial R&D, because we had one of our chairs, James Fazzino, on a live online session recently. He was talking about Australian manufacturing is booming, it's in its boom time. But he said what you find is the actual manufacturing is not being done locally. And he did sort of support One of the comments you made around the intellectual capacity here, so the design, but there was also sort of going into the environment, whether it's manufacturing or whether it's proximity to energy or whether it's the access to funding or the tax structure, the R&D credits, just said it's not as attractive as some of the counterparts. And so you find that these projects and initiatives go into other parts of the world. What do you sort of see? Do you— See a combination, or is there certain things that, yes, got to get that done in, you know, Melbourne, Australia, or no, that's a job for the—

I think, I mean, I, I've been in this industry a long time, and I grew up, grew up in Geelong, which was a city set up on manufacturing, you know, using migrant workplace to bring lots of factories in place. And so when people think of manufacturing, they always think of highly individual, big factories, lots of people. And frankly, that's not the way of the world. We're Australia, and you're right, James is correct, is in certain levels of manufacture, Australia does extremely well from an export perspective because when it can— when it can focus on low-volume, high-value manufacture, you don't need to go to China for fast-moving goods and volume. What then is— what really is important is capability and pulling it together in design. And, you know, if your product is valuable enough, you know, you think of Switzerland and Rolex watches. I mean, not huge volume, but the value and the people who make them create a huge lot of value for themselves because of their expertise in their manufacturing process. Yeah. So in lots of areas, particularly say medical devices that I know reasonably well, you look at Cochlear, they do a lot of their manufacturing still in Sydney. Of most of their units because it's a very, very complex manufacturing program. They've got highly trained workforce. You can't roboticize a lot of the parts of it. And the supply chains, they've got people around the world, but most of it's done in Sydney and they can export huge amounts of value. Similarly with ResMed, as a lot of those companies move down the chain and a lot of the processes become industrialized, it can become cheaper to take it offshore. But they're constantly innovating better manufacturing processes. So I think part of the thing is the storytelling around manufacture. When you look at the moment, I think most people think manufacturing is a source of jobs. And to some degree, it's not. It should be a source of value and a source of revenue. And you want to be as efficient as you can manufacturing a very high-value good with the least amount of input as possible using your intellectual capability. And Australia in some cases have done extremely well with that. But where the politicians, I think, and the general public get confused is that, oh, we're not manufacturing in this country because there's no manufacturing industry, because there's no jobs. Actually, the jobs that are in manufacturing in many cases now are extremely well paid because they're making stuff that's extremely important. That's the challenge for us. And if you look at, for example, the government's recent discussion about quantum, quantum dots, and perhaps building an industry around that. That's not going to employ 30,000 people to manufacture quantum-based computers. But if Australia can control the manufacturing processes for high-value goods that have it and then use, uh, license their manufacturing capability to lower-cost countries if necessary for higher value, they still can get the money coming back. And that's, that's the challenge that I think the next 30 to 40 years this country is going to have to face because we're training people extremely well. We can move into new industries that haven't been created. But if we keep falling back to say, well, we have to have people working in manufacture to keep everybody in the workforce, that's not going to be the case.

Yep. Yep. Okay. Thank you for sharing, Robert. I might just switch gears a little bit here. And maybe go a little deeper into innovation. So you've mentioned a couple of examples there, and, you know, thinking about the listenership, not everybody has the pleasure of working in biometrics. So, you mean, you're literally— the work that you're doing will and can lead to an improvement of life. That is a huge motivating component. The one you just mentioned around epilepsy. An executive like yourself in a different industry where they're not maybe saving the world, they're providing value of a commercial product, trying to drive innovation. How do you, in your experience, how do you sort of go to galvanize action or the execution when it isn't such a big, like I imagine some of your projects aren't literally saving the world. So yeah.

Oh, but I mean, you know, innovation, as I said, it's very, very deep and it's different levels. And I've worked in other industries as well, and in many cases, you know, they've got a great product, but the challenge is it's too expensive. And unless they get the cost down, um, they're never going to make any money. I mean, so from a pure capitalist point of view, innovation is still really important. And, you know, you've got a workforce that's got something they really like They think it could be really cool, but there's another product in the marketplace that's got all the demand. Either it's because it's got features that the product doesn't have. So how do I innovate those features in? Or it's too expensive and how do I get the cost down? And then clearly the purpose for the people working in that company, they've got to want to be working around that product. They've got to have some desire to be in that industry.

Yep.

Um, and that's the same with purpose. So our purpose is, or we convince everyone, that whatever you do at some point could lead to better healthcare outcomes. If you're an engineer or you're a marketer and you're passionate about proving yourself or proving what you can do, and that's your purpose, then innovation helps you because you're convincing your people, let's— we've got this product, we need to make it better, how do we do that? And that's when they play to the innovation cycle. And then their purpose they've got to identify in the company is, well, let's get behind this because we can lead, we can play the competitive threat, let's be number one in our industry, as opposed to curing mankind. I've seen other innovators and other entrepreneurs build great cultures because they use getting people to think they can lead the world in some areas. Not so much curing the world, but leading the world. I've seen people do that.

Yes, and it sort of Just listening to your answer there, it's almost like you're appealing to a bit of a competitive spirit, you know, and people do want to win.

And there's no doubt, there's no doubt that, you know, everyone has an ego and you need a purpose of why to get up and work to do it. But at the end of the day, if you think what you're doing is making a difference, um, you know, in a lot of the management books that you and I have discussed before, it's the same thing. If, if you can give people a purpose, whatever that is, They lead the world, their ego gets looked after, they're helping somebody. They will come and they will do things and they will go that extra yard. And that's part of the innovation process as well, because sometimes it's more perspiration than inspiration.

Yeah.

And you just gotta— and sometimes you just have to keep working and working, because in many cases innovation requires other parts of the equation to come into being before your invention becomes important. classic is streaming. I mean, it was 4 or 5 companies were, were ready to go, but the internet wasn't good enough and they all failed. And then Netflix just happened to arrive at the same time. It's the same thing. And anyone working in innovation, they have to be prepared to wait sometimes for other parts of the equation to be developed so that they can move ahead. So I think everyone that leads innovative companies, the trick is to find give to the people that work there the purpose. And mine is a lot easier than most because I can point to, if we can get this right look at the disease, we can cure. But if you're working in a fast-moving consumer good company, um, you know, fast fashion for want of a better term.

Yeah.

But, you know, if you believe in it, you love fashion, you want to be ahead of the curve, you want to show that you— your fashion's made it, it's doing a podcast and you're number one on the Spotify hit-ups, You need to be giving someone a purpose about why they're doing it, why they go the extra yard.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing, Rob. And, um, I mentioned we're going to flip it. Um, so we've talked about innovation, and, and something that we were discussing maybe before we, we got on air was around failure. So I'd love to dig into your relationship with failure, your philosophy around failure, and just if we could share that. And it's a big open question, I know.

I mean, I've had enough failures in my life and I kept thinking, well, eventually I'll learn from the failures. But, um, that's sort of been different in the case. But I mean, you know, there's that sort of aphorism that, you know, there's no such thing as failure, there's only a learning exercise. To some degree that's true. I know it's always true if you look at it that way. And the culture, I guess, that I've grown up with in Australia is I got into this sort technology industry out of university 40 years ago, and you see some inventors, but clearly it's changed a little bit, but not that much. Most Australians are— will have a go, but they won't put themselves out there for fear of failure. And that's something that anyone that works in the innovation sector will tell you all the time. The ones that have been truly successful, you know, if you go back through their history they've probably failed 5 or 6 times. But when you're talking to young academics who want to transition to entrepreneurship, for example, and they've spent 25 years of their life being trained from kindergarten through to the end of their PhD, and they've got an idea and they've got their first government grants, and then they make an invention and someone like me says, great, let's, let's start a company, let's have a go at developing it. they've got to ask themselves in Australia, if they have a go and it fails, they may not be able to get back into academia. And so they're— some of them are too scared to actually take that chance. Some of the others say, well, what's the worst that can happen? It'll fail, I would have learned something, I'll go somewhere else. But that's easier to say, but in Australia there's actually not a lot of examples of that case.

Hmm.

If you take the US model, for example, Most entrepreneurs will have failed at least 2 times, if not 3, before they're successful. And there's a whole thing about a dinner party, or how many failures have you had, or first one's failed, second one's failed. They love it, they embrace it.

They do.

That is not the case in Australia, and we're all trying to change that. But part of the issue is there's enough entrepreneurs that have lived through it, will give people a second chance because they've got a they've got a history of doing it and they've got a knowledge of what it takes and they've got a network. Whereas in Australia, a lot of people who have failed don't like talking about their failures as a case study at all. And so people think the only ones who have been successful have always been successful. And if I'm a failure, my career's gone. There hasn't been a lot of storytelling about, okay, you failed. What's your case study on this podcast, for example? You might have someone that failed 3 or 4 times. They talk about the one they were successful on, but the really important messaging they're giving to people to follow them is that I failed the first time, here's what I learned. I failed the second time, here's what I learned. I failed the third time, here's what I learned. Because we don't teach that, um, either subliminally to our next generation of entrepreneurs, my observation is that a lot of people are still scared and that everyone's learning it the first time without falling back on the knowledge that's already there. And it's not to say that people won't make the same mistakes or different mistakes, but there's nothing better than talking to you and finding out what you did so I don't do the same thing.

Yeah.

Doesn't mean I won't fail the second time around, but it is amazing the same mistakes are made often, often, often. And if we had a pool of people who could share that knowledge with the next generation, I think you'd be much more efficient. Yeah, but that history of sharing my, my horror stories of how it went wrong— people in Australia don't tend to do that culturally, whereas in America in particular, they love talking about, oh yeah, the first one failed. Yeah, this is what happened. Went on to the next one.

Yeah.

We don't have that. We don't have that type of role model here. And I think until we can get a few people prepared to talk about how they blew it up, and what they learned and why they got it right the second time, you won't have enough of a base to really build a big entrepreneurial culture from. And hopefully that will change. But, you know, you and I are in the mentor list together and we're around some very successful people. But when I sit around the table with you, the successful people talk about the successes. We very rarely talk about what mistakes we made. And I just think we learn more from mistakes.

Oh, definitely. Absolutely. So you mentioned 40 years, and I know you, you started as a lawyer, as many lawyers do, and went and did something completely different. Um, probably a good industry to get in given the IP components, but I'm not sure how on the tools you are with writing those, uh, those documents to protect your interests of the things that you're creating and finding. Um, have— do you see it— is there things you look for now to effectively bring something to failing faster, or You know, from an R&D perspective, is there a philosophy or process or cadence you guys—

Yeah, well, the thing is, when I first started, I kept thinking you had to build the ideal product from the get-go. And also, everyone does market research because when I went through university, I got myself through by knocking on doors doing market research surveys. So everyone tells me you've got to work out what the market is and you've got to work out where your product's going to be positioned. I guess what I've learned over the years is, you know what, you can do all the research you like, you probably never know how good a product's going to be until you get it out there. The second thing is I've learned you can spend as much time as you like trying to design the ideal product, you're crazy. The best thing you can do is build the minimum viable product and get it in the hands as quickly as you can of your customers, and they'll tell you very, very quickly what's wrong with it. And they'll tell you very, very quickly what's right with it, and they'll tell you where to focus. But the amount of people I work with in my career who were so smart, and they kept tinkering and tinkering and tinkering and just wasted their time. The thing that I've learned is that it doesn't always have to be the best, it doesn't have to be finished, but sometimes just seeing a concept and putting into the hand of a potential customer That alchemy of a customer saying, you know what, that's really cool, why don't you do this? All the great minds have never thought to do it. That to me is the biggest learning I've got, which is get it out as quickly as you can, protect it clearly, um, get into the hands of your customers as quickly as you can, and listen, and listen very closely to what they're saying. And sometimes, for example, you know, we talk to doctors all the time about drugs when I was going part of my career. In a lot of cases, the, the success of a drug was how the patient's going to react. And so talking to patients rather than the doctors was something that we never used to do a lot of. That's really important. And similarly, if you're developing something for ICU, you know, doctors don't have very much to do with patients in ICU. It's the It's the nurses.

Yep.

And talking to nurses. So the other thing I've learned is that we always think that there's the, the big guru that you need to get on side, and clearly you often do, but there's a lot more people involved in that process who are often hidden away who have got insights that can make or break a product. And that to me, that form factors, that human factors, getting it out quickly before it's finished Putting into his hands as many people, and more important, listening to what people are saying, because we all filter these things through our own bias. That's what's killed a lot of innovation in my time, because I've seen really smart people— this is what they all need, this is what they all need, this is what I'm going to build— and people were telling them not, and they didn't listen, and they wasted it. So that— it sounds really simple, sounds really trite, But we're so highly educated, we want to always deal with la professor. But many times the person at the coalface who's going to use your product, they're going to tell you what they want. And if it's not built into it, they'll go somewhere else. That to me has been the biggest learning in my 40 years.

Great. And I mean, that's probably one of the first things we were mentioning when we started talking about innovation. You were talking about we've got GPs, surgeons, and you had that use case example where they were clearly in there giving you feedback about what they wanted. And you're right, It does sound obvious and simple, but it's a really good refresher because it's very obvious that that's needed because they're the end customer.

I mean, you can have electronics in a lot of these wonderful implants that you've got, but if you require the patient to have to charge it every 4 hours, they're not going to use it. So sometimes you can have all the incredible electronics and what they can do. In many cases, it's the power supply It's the rate-limiting step, right? And similarly, you know, if you want to wear something that you want to swim with and have a life with, or you want to run in and you sweat with electronics, if those devices can't handle the normal situation, no matter how good they are and what they can do, they're not going to be used.

And just out of interest, I mean, given the industry that you're in, what are some of the weird and wonderful things that you're seeing or that are emerging in terms of You mentioned wearables and maybe just an insight from your privileged position around some of the things that may or may not be coming.

Yeah, I think, well, I was involved in the bionic eye development for a long time and that's still sort of going very quietly. But the whole idea was to put implants into people's eyes. Yeah. And that was 20 years of work and still ongoing. But now you're seeing people developing better glasses that have got implants in them so they can use the glasses they wear and the spectacles they wear as opposed to having to put things into people's eyes.

So is the implant like an eye prosthetic?

Yeah. Okay. It's a little electronic chip. The one I was working on was an electronic chip. Effectively, it was implanted on the— on or just behind the retina and it was attached to a stimulator and that would stimulate the nerve cells in the back of the eye. And yeah. to allow them to fire. That was one way. But now we're seeing all this great effort being created in much better digitization and pixelization that we've seen from television and video. Yes, we're not affecting vision per se, but they're using alternate means to actually allow people to see better. That's actually one thing that's happening.

Yeah.

Are you seeing things Within hearing aids, it's an area that we work in. You know, people are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So now they can wear them in the shower. Because part of the issue with hearing aids is people get them and they don't use them because they're uncomfortable.

Yes.

The little things that's making a difference is that, you know, they're much easier to wear and they can— people can sleep in them. You'd think, why would they sleep in them? But part of the reason you want them to sleep in them, they never take them out. They're not taking them out. They'll always hear. So little things like that are changing. Yeah, you've caught me on the spot a bit. I guess the other thing is what we're seeing is that with app-based technology, I wear a Garmin watch. You probably wear the same. You're monitoring heart rate, you're running. But a lot of these devices that now are being put into the body that the patient can get an app to monitor their own activity. means the patients can control their own life. And once the, once the device has been put in there, it's, it's the data that's being generated that the patient can now control. That's what's changing.

Yeah.

And the ability to actually get that data interface with people, you know, whether it be a watch or a wearable, the clothes you wear, uh, what that can— because you can measure your brain activity, for example, and that can help you sleep. And that's once you've got certain devices on you It changes the way you live. Now, that 20 years ago wasn't the case at all. Yeah, it is now.

Unbelievable. It's, it is what's— it's, it's exciting where, where, where things are going. And, you know, the wearable technology, um, I was at a conference fairly recently talking, talking about this whole area above your eyelids, how it's a wasted peripheral vision. You don't use it. You know, you need to have your, your daughter's heart rate there and, you know, yeah. Your shopping list can be up in this and it's like, oh my God, it's unbelievable. Um, all right, sorry, Robert, I told you I like to go on tangents. Oh, I love that, Dave. That's an interesting tangent, but what a fantastic industry you're in. Um, you know, an industry known for innovation. Um, and thank you for sort of sharing your ideas around innovation, failure. Um, sounds like they're sort of all part of the process. So might move into some short answers, but just before we do, was there any questions? You're a, a podcast interviewer. Was there any that You thought, I hope Dave asked me this question today?

No, no, I was hoping you wouldn't ask me a lot of questions.

Okay.

No, not really. I think it's more with being the person being interviewed for a change. And I like the idea of just giving a message to any entrepreneurs that are listening to it or any innovators that are listening to it. I think the key message that I'd get across, and it is part of the Australian culture, is that we are very proud to be humble. which I think is great.

That's true.

And I think confident humility is a wonderful trait, but I think sometimes we're too humble. And I think we do a pretty poor job in many cases of allowing the general public to get excited about what we're doing. And we hate saying we're the best in the world because, you know, you've got a big head. And there are many cases where Australians are the best in the world, and we should remind people of that. And there's nothing wrong with— you can be humble by saying that, and you don't have to be the rah-rah, I'm the very best. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs and people looking for money, if you want to get money out of someone, you need to convince them you're worth backing. And I think the key thing that I'll— now that I'm on the podcast on the other side, if I can reinforce, it's for people to have the confidence to tell other people that they are the best. and why they're the best. They don't have to be a big noter, they don't have to be a liar, but you're not going to get big licks of capital to back yourself unless you show the confidence in yourself and understand why you're better than the competition.

Yeah.

And in many, many cases, and you've seen it in our mentor list, and, and I've seen in the people I work with, they are the best in the world, and yet you put them in a room of people and they get really quiet. If you want to get money out of people, you've got to convince them that you're the best and worth backing. And that's, that's the one thing I— if I do nothing else from this podcast, I want people to be prepared to learn how to speak positively, simply about areas that they're good at. And the other thing I think most Australians do poorly, particularly in the field that I'm in, highly educated people always fall back on jargon.

Right.

And one of the things that I think is holding, holding us back from an innovation perspective is getting the support behind that because we don't tell the story about, you know, if I get this working, this is what it could do and, and make it simple for people. We very much talk about the technology. We talk about the circuit boards doing X, Y, and Z. Frankly, you and I couldn't care about that. But what we would care about, if I could get this to work, It means you could do X and Y much better. And when we train our younger generations of scientists and technologists, we do a really poor job in teaching them how to speak simply and tell a story. And on this podcast, if I can just push that line to people, learn to tell stories about what you're doing because people will listen to you, people understand you, and people will back you.

Yeah.

But if you don't tell a story, and you make them feel stupid because they don't understand your technology, they'll just say— they'll smile at you and you'll lose them. And that's something like, I guess, in the last 10 years in particular, it's become really obvious to me that the people who get backed are very good storytellers.

Yep. And it sort of goes back to your previous comments around you're going to get these highly educated individuals out there in the field getting feedback, iterating the product. And so that that demands a, um, not a layman's term, but an ability to communicate the concept. And yeah, so I think it's, uh, it's come full circle.

I mean, if you look at the iPhone, here's a classic example. People look at an iPhone, they see it, they know what it can do. The technology in an iPhone is incredible. You and I probably wouldn't know, we don't know 0.1% of what's in it, and it doesn't matter. We just want to buy a sexy looking iPhone.

That's true.

And it was sold because here's what I can do for you. It was never sold about what the technology was in it. But if you look at an iPhone, it is the most technologically advanced thing you've probably ever got. That's not how it's sold.

Yeah, good point. Good point. I can imagine an Apple techie trying to, uh, correct, talk to us.

I've met those Apple techs and they're geeks, right? But they're not the people that you and I interact with.

No, no. All right, well, thanks, Robert. We're going to move into some short answer now, and you may have, um, already answered my second one, but we'll We'll kick off. Just, is there a favorite quote that you have that you'd like to share, or some— a bunch of words that you might live by?

Yeah, I mean, I love the— well, Jim Collins is sort of the management guru, you know, The Good to Great. Um, sort of all his teachings are something we live by. So, yep, because I've got the flu and my brain's not working quickly enough to tell you what they are, but he's been a big driver for me personally. And it's about best people, right people. What does he say? Right people, right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus, and then put the people in the right position. It's sort of as simple as that, um, but it's really hard to do.

Yep. And one of my other questions was, was there a favorite book? And I know you've just mentioned Jim, but maybe around the theme of innovation, is there anything you'd recommend people pick up?

There was a book that I read Christmas last year, it was a book called Range. Um, there was this whole concept of how does step change seem to happen, you know, in innovation. And some great stories there about, you know, all these people with domain knowledge working assiduously for years and years. It was only when they had someone else coming in with intelligence from another area and say, you know what, in my field we did this, have you ever tried that? And sometimes there's insights from people who are outside your field coming in looking at your area with new eyes often is that catalyst for major change. And that book's got some fantastic examples, and I made sure everyone at the Institute read it. And what happens is we, you know, the old line, birds of a feather flock together. So all biotechnologists sit together, all engineers sit together.

Yeah.

But when you bring someone else in from left field to have a look at what you're doing, it says, guys, why have you been doing it that way? We've done it this way in this industry. Oh, I didn't know that. Let's try it. That sometimes has enormous ramifications. So I think the trick is to put people together who are outside your area of knowledge or comfort but are open-minded. Great things can happen.

Yeah, fantastic. And back to your examples around bringing this sort of individuals from outside the lab into the lab and vice versa. So certainly living and breathing these learnings. The last one was just any advice you'd have to your younger self. And I know we've just covered your message, but—

Yeah, I think, I think my younger self, be much more confident in who you are. I was a very meek and mild— I know you laugh because you know me pretty well. I was a very meek and mild person who didn't speak up very much. Then I changed and spoke up too much. Learn to listen more, know that it's going to turn out okay, be prepared to accept that you don't know everything, seek out smart people and listen. And probably if I had my time over again, you know, probably move into a different business. I'd probably move into the investment banking business, to be honest, rather than on the other side. I just think I've had a joy in that I've worked with some incredibly smart people, way smarter than me. I've seen some amazing things happen. But I think learning— the other thing I would teach myself is when I was growing up, you know, first-generation migrant, um, working the factory, head down, earn a wage, do a good thing. And that's what we grew up with. It wasn't learning how to sell. It wasn't learning how to take risk. It wasn't learning how to back yourself, because that's not how I was brought up. The younger person, if I could go back, I would seek out people who were successful and ask to sit there with a coffee and find out how did you go about it, because I never did that. Fortunately, that's happened to me in my career, but I could have probably saved myself a lot of time.

Yeah, fantastic. Okay, we're about to head into rapid fire, so are you ready? Do you want to put the tea down or you're, uh, Okay, good to roll. All right, so we've got a minute and I'll throw as many questions at you as I possibly can to get into your subconscious. So ready to go?

I am.

All right. Creativity or discipline?

Creativity.

Brainstorming or structured planning?

Brainstorming.

Incremental improvements or disruptive breakthroughs?

Disruptive.

Individual genius or team collaboration?

Team.

Risk-taking or risk management?

Risk-taking.

Diversity of thought versus consistency of vision?

Consistency of vision.

Long-term vision or short-term wins?

Long-term vision.

Autonomy or guidance?

Guidance.

Technology-driven or human-centered?

Human-centered.

Top-down, bottom-up?

Bottom-up.

Experiment— oh God, I can't even read my own words. Experimentation or proven methods?

Experimentation.

Flexible workplaces or traditional workplaces?

Flexible.

Communication or need-to-know basis?

Communication.

Customer feedback or market trends?

Customer feedback.

Startup culture or corporate environment?

Startup culture.

Fast failure, slow perfection?

Fast failure.

Data-driven or intuition?

Data-driven.

Internal R&D or external partnerships?

Both.

Patent— good answer. Patent protection or open source?

Patent protection.

Local force or global perspective?

Global perspective.

There we go, John. I don't think we can catch you off guard.

Fantastic.

Oh, fantastic. Well, thanks for your energy today and coming on the show. Oh, I don't know about that.

I really enjoyed that.

Oh, thank you, John. Well, um, I know the listeners will get a lot of benefit from that, and it's such a privileged industry and business and, uh, to be able to sort of share this conversation with you. And I know we could have gone in many, many different directions, and we went really narrow today around innovation. Yeah. And I really appreciate you lending us your thinking and Yeah, connecting with the listeners today.

Thanks, David. That was good fun.