We love to celebrate the spark of a good idea, but we too often skip over the long, uneven road it takes to get that idea into the world.
Research on innovation keeps pointing to the same tension: breakthroughs come from serendipity and “structural holes,” where people from different disciplines collide, but impact only happens when we deliberately smooth the path that follows. That’s what made a conversation I led at Baltimore’s University of Maryland Biopark, inside the innovation district’s year-old 4MLK building feel special.
I contributed Technically coverage here and here. The Biopark team had a photographer on site, so I also just pulled some of the shots of me in action below.
On a bitterly cold December afternoon, more than 50 people gathered as I moderated a discussion between two deeply relevant voices — an ER doctor turned medtech founder Elizabeth Clayborne (find Nasaclip coverage here) and Dr. Martha Wang, Assistant Director of the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices at the University of Maryland and associate clinical professor. One os building the infrastructure to support the other, focused not just on Eureka moments, but on what happens after. It was a reminder that if we want more ideas to matter, we have to design spaces and systems that encourage both the collision and the climb.
Find other photos from the event here.
