The best Tech you can have
Last Friday I was at an innovation lab in the health care sector, and I was floored by their amazing work. What struck me was not the state-of-the art VR tech, not the enormous screens and powerful computers. It was a can of shaving foam, and the humble yet powerful attitude of needs-first innovation that made this lab special.
Changing lives
I am lucky to meet with many founders and product owners who jet around the world, looking for contracts, scale, anything to fulill their grandiose ambition, and more power to them. It’s inspiring to me and I enjoy helping them solve some of their challenges. Yet often, their business is actually about making the lives of the one percent, one percent better. Or making great software for multibillion dollar organizations, who already have pretty good software. Very often, lives aren’t really changed, even though their mission statement would have the world change overnight. But here, in this little lab in a little town in The Netherlands, lives are changed, every day.
You see, this was not just any health care innovation lab. This was a place catering to people with multiple, serious and life-altering disorders. One client is a young, previously succesful entrepreneur who suffered brain damage in an accident. His motor control is now all over the place and his reaction time is over six seconds. Another client is a smart, sassy but very handicapped young lady who needs a wheelchair and very specific interactions, due to her autism. In this place, severe epilepsy is often just one of the less disabling things people are saddled with. You get the picture: these clients live in a very small world, are totally dependent on their caretakers, and the tech that works for you and me is not easy for them to use. Moreover, there is no antibiotic, vaccine or treatment that can help them overcome their monumental challenges. Technology can, at best, divert them a little. But sometimes, a little means a lot.
Make life more fun, beautiful and easy
Enter Johan Elbers. A tall, fatherly figure with an excellent radio voice (I’m still trying to get him on my podcast), he set out to do what almost no-one in tech is doing: solve one problem at a time, for one individual at a time, using the simplest and cheapest technology that will do the job 10x better than before.
Johan cares about people more than about technology, yet knows that the right ‘things’ make all the difference in people’s lives. His mission is spelled out in large letters above the entrance to the lab: “Make life more fun, beautiful and easy”. He sets out to make the world his clients live in larger, and more engaging. Oftentimes, this happens through the use of technology. But whereas a lot of labs and start-ups in this space are chasing the MVP-with-scale-potential, Elbers focusses on the individual case. To his suprise, he often finds that solutions developed for one client translate with minor modifications to other clients and cases as well.
Shaving Foam
And this is where the foam comes in. In front of a kid who is so terrified of his own hands he regularly mutilates them, Elbers’ co-worker puts a blob of shaving foam on the table. Tentatively, a finger reaches out. Touching. Pulling back. Then again. Squeezing. Amazement! It makes sound. Fizzes and pops when pressed. It smells like menthol, like a father’s cheek in the morning. It sticks without being oily or slimy. A good half hour later, the kid is still playing, engaging, with a smile on his face. Not only that, he is happier and less self-destructive for hours after a play session with foam. This makes a huge difference in his life, and that of his caretakers. The cans with foam are now the most popular item in the lab.
Agency
Another typical (and slightly more high-tech) Elbers innovation is to use voice assistants to increase the control his clients have over their environment. Using custom voice-skills and a lot of off-the-shelf consumer domotica, he creates environments where people who previously needed help even to turn on the lights or the TV can now spend hours without needing to call for someone. This brings agency back into lives that had none, giving people a sense of empowerment back and considerably easing the burden on caretakers. Not that they minded being called to turn on the lights or TV, but their clients are much calmer and happier when they can do it themselves, leading to entire wards being much more peaceful places than before.
A blue car named Desire
For the brain-damaged entrepreneur, he figured out that the man’s great passion had been driving his blue BMW. A few days later Elbers and his staff rigged an XBox (with the excellent Adaptive Controller) on a jury-rigged desk with a lot of cut-outs for pressure pads, buttons and joysticks. The client was wheeled in, and the video game, featureing a close facsimile of his blue Beemer, was fired up. You’d have to see it to truly get how amazing this was. Months of intensifying moreoseness were lifted as he pressed the accelerator with a huge smile on his face. He was driving again! His life was all about the things he could no longer do, about the daily humiliations of an intellegent and entrepreneurial mind locked in a severely disabled body. Yet here he was, gleefully barrelling through lap after lap in the simulator.
The best Tech
Now this is technology making a difference. It’s not intelligent, artificially or otherwise. It doesn’t run on any kind of blockchain. There is no data being gathered, let alone big data (although we are looking into this). There are no clouds in sight. There is no VC pressing for something, anything to be put out on the market. There is no social media strategy. It’s really, really great.
The lesson for me is that the best tech that you can have is the stuff that really makes a difference in your life. It’s not quite less-is-more, but rather enablement over specifications.
I don’t care if my phone has the most pixels or megaherts or gigabytes, but I care very much that it supports the apps I run my life on. I don’t need to have the 5.7 litre HEMI Truck (although the little boy in me would love it), as my trusty little 1.4 litre truck can reliably take me and my family as far as Paris with everything we need for a week away from home.
The lesson for my customers is simple. Yes, in theory the latest thing is also the greatest. Yes, there are no doubt many flaws with the current set-up that need addressing. But no, we don’t need New Tech nearly as much as we need to understand what problem we are solving, and be practical about solving it. Insired by Johan and his team, I focus on making the lives of individual customers and colleagues 10x better with the simplest, most effective hacks we can think of, and then seeing if our solution can translate to other cases. I bought my first can of shaving foam in 15 years, just to remind me of this extraordinary little lab and its powerful message: The best tech you can have makes life more fun, beautiful and easy. It doesn't take a lot to do a lot.
Got inspired? Let’s talk about what kind of lab could make a difference to you and the people you help every. DM me at @sharpestthought on Twitter.
