In 2007, Jorge Odon won a bet.
The premise, on the whole, was simple: to remove a cork from inside a glass wine bottle with only a plastic bag. It was an ordinary, wholly unremarkable wager–the quintessential parlor trick. Odon’s friends thought it easy pickings. He walked away with significant bragging rights–and, more importantly, an idea.
Ideas, as Christopher Nolan attests, are often like cancers–they are tenacious, and spread quickly. That night, Odon lay restless, at the precipice of inspiration, unable to shake off the notion that had burrowed itself deeply in his subconscious. By morning, the cancer metastasized. Jorge had forged a vision for radically transforming neonatal delivery.
The story of Jorge Odon is, on the surface, the classic tale of inspired invention–the interweave of technical prowess with inspired application to solve a grand challenge. Except, that is, for one thing: Mr. Odon is not a biomedical engineer. In fact, he’s not an engineer of any kind. Nor is he a scientist, public health activist, or even a serial inventor. Jorge Odon is a car mechanic.
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The very nature of innovation is an intricate and storied one. Yet the lens through which we view this nebulous and often messy process has been anything but. In 1958, Vannevar Bush published the now-ubiquitously-cited report “Science and the Endless Frontier,” which laid the groundwork for science, technology and innovation policy as we characterize it today. In it, Bush argues for a linear conception of technological innovation–an iterative process in which basic research fuels applied development; an assembly line of transformative ideas.
This paradigm quickly took hold. Today, academics, policymakers, and industry experts alike cling to the linear model of innovation, even as we recognize that invention in practice is chaotic, and cyclical–a feedback loop with neither beginning nor end. Science drives technology, yes, but the reverse is just as often true. The work of Mr. Odon is perhaps the most tangible exemplification of this reality.
I met Odon at the recent “Access to Medical Devices” conference this past week at the WHO–a two-day summit featuring some of the world’s leading experts on medical technology, intellectual property, entrepreneurship, health policy, global health, and technology commercialization across government, academia, and industry. It was a feast of ideas–intellectual carcinogens–on how to ensure that health technologies are made available, accessible, and affordable where they are needed most. But what I was struck by most was how thoroughly Odon’s story bucked the standard narrative of biomedical innovation.
Is there, then, a means of effectively empowering “DIY” solutions to global health challenges? How many other Jorge Odon’s await the deployment of their visions on a grand scale? The question is an open one, but I can’t help but feel that the doors to a healthier world may lie closed without an answer.
