...are developing new cancer drugs here...We have a number of them in the pipeline.
What other marquee projects do you have cooking in the labs?
We developed the core technology for minimally invasive robotics surgery. The idea formed in a company, Intuitive Surgical, which is now a $4bn company. And the idea is, instead of doing open heart surgery by cutting open your chest cavity, which means you have to be in the hospital for a week or two, you put three probes into your chest cavity, with three small tubes, but at the end of the tubes, allow the doctor to be able to see in 3D and have the sense of touch as well as if he actually was inside your chest cavity...So in principle the doctor doesn't have to be anywhere near the patient. The doctor could be across the world to do an operation like this.
What we just won from DARPA, a government agency, is a project to work with Intuitive Surgical and other partners to shrink this technology down to the size of a medium-size table. So the patient would be on it — first in a battlefield situation where a robot would be able to clean the patient's suture wounds, take blood samples tests, and be connected back to an operator at a remote site to be able to take care of patients.
We think this kind of technology will end up in emergency rooms.
I know you're writing a book about the process of innovation. Please talk about that.
Well, the first observation about innovation is it's a process. Innovation is also a creative act, and the question is, how can you be more disciplined about it, how can you create a process that'll be much more effective in getting you from the start to the end?
We've studied best practices from companies all over the world for 15 years, 20 years now actually, and every time we find somebody [with] the best practice, we would like to study them.
Give me an example of a company you've worked with that has influenced you or been a best-practice icon.
Certainly, one company we spend [a lot of time looking at] is Toyota. Toyota is very disciplined in the way they go about their innovation process.
[Its] factory across the [San Francisco] bay... used to be the worst in America, and after Toyota formed a joint venture with GM a couple of years later it was the best factory in America — same people, same technology, same union.
There's a whole philosophy behind what they do, but one of the key ideas is to involve everybody in the organisation on a quest for continuous improvement. At SRI, we call that tapping into the genius of the team. So, if any chief executive thinks he's going to make all the decisions in the company today, you know, that's a hopelessly naïve thought. The genius in the organisation resides in the people who are actually doing the work or touching the products... who [are interacting] with customers and who understand the technology — that's where the innovations are going to happen.
How does that apply to SRI, and do you always work with clients on projects?
Almost always. We invest a great deal of money back into our own programmes. But the end objective has always been to do great science and get that eventually in the hands of real users so we [can make] an impact.
The process for innovation we have here, we call the SRI five disciplines of innovation... The first one is to work on important problems, not interesting ones, and we take that very seriously.
This is the best time in the history of science and technology. There are more opportunities in every field, whether it [is] biotech, nanotech or infotech — everything is up for grabs.
Why now?
It's the convergence of a number of factors... creating transformational...
