Technology Adoption

Welcome to the 21st century, where paradigms are shifting, roles are reversing, and changes in workflow influence—perhaps even dictate—new patterns of thought. If that sounds new age to you, then you might be onto something, because this is a new age, and new rules apply. We can no longer succeed by sitting atop a power hierarchy and bending others to our will; instead, we must step into the flow of others' work. This applies to every field, including biomedical engineering, where every inventor has a story about groundbreaking technology that never reached its target market. To what extent does changing our mindset for the 21st century influence the success of a device? To answer this question, we need to know the following: when useful technology, invented by the greatest minds in science, fails, what went wrong? And more importantly, when it succeeded—both from a medical and financial point of view—what went right, and how do we replicate that?