the most crushingly disappointing
failure i have ever had in my
professional life turned into the
launching pad from my laboratory to spin
out six companies that have been funded
to the tune of a hundred and eighty
million dollars these companies are
already changing people’s lives now how
the heck did that happen at my lab we’re
all about harnessing our imaginations to
dream up ideas for new technologies that
have never been achieved I’d say we get
excited pretty easily and sometimes we
are vulnerable to letting our enthusiasm
run away with us and that has led us
down the wrong path several years ago
one of the first big ideas we dreamed up
was in the area of stem-cell therapy we
wanted to see if we could infuse cells
into a patient’s bloodstream and then
program those cells to travel anywhere
they needed to go imagine specially
programmed stem cells that could travel
to the bones to treat osteoporosis or
wounds to accelerate healing or to the
gut to alleviate inflammatory bowel
disease or to the joints to treat
arthritis the possibility seemed
limitless well for the men and women at
my lab the idea of program stem cell
therapy was too exciting to leave in the
wouldn’t it be cool stage so in 2007 as
the first major project in my brand new
lab we decided to try this for real and
by 2009 we had made some exciting
progress I called a local investor and
described how we were able to improve
the homing of in few cells to sites of
inflammation he agreed to
me to talk about the possibilities I saw
a big future I was really excited I
described the technology and our data of
course what I hope to hear was
congratulations Jeff you and your team
are about to change the world world oh
but that’s not what happens
not even close he said look Jeff this
will make a great academic paper but
it’s just too complicated for us to fund
it’s too risky needless to say I was
kind of devastated our last two years of
work the first major project in my lab
looked like a complete failure we had
developed a complex process that worked
but we hadn’t even considered all the
challenges that our invention would face
on route to the commercial marketplace
how could we have made such a basic
mistake well there are a couple of
reasons the first place that we fell
short was that without realizing it we
had bought in to a giant myth in
academia there’s an unwritten code that
the more complex you can make something
and succeed the more recognition you can
secure by publishing in a high-impact
journal for example so there’s a premium
on complexity but there’s another reason
we didn’t get the reaction we had hoped
for naively I had always thought that
the hard part was getting something to
work in the lab and the rest would be
taken care of by the entrepreneurs or
companies that licensed our technologies
surely they’d be able to take what we
did and quickly bring it to patients
right wrong I was totally wrong that
investor taught us an important lesson
if you want to translate your vision
into medical practice you will need to
come up with simpler approaches now on
first hearing this may sound like the
Wester was advocating the KISS principle
does anyone know what that stands for
keep it simple stupid but the investor
wasn’t saying dumb it down he was making
a different point altogether in 1977
Apple computers first slogan was
simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication that quote is often
credited to Leonardo da Vinci and has
become a credo of a generation of
aerospace engineers simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication why is that idea
so powerful let me answer that question
with a metaphor lots of brilliant
engineers can build a rocket to the moon
with a 1 trillion dollar budget and 10
million custom-made parts but to build a
working moon rocket with a limited
number of only off-the-shelf components
well that takes more than brilliance
that takes genius we could quibble over
the numbers but that’s the kind of
simplicity the investor was referring to
he showed us that the more complex our
technologies the more difficult they’d
be to manufacture and do quality control
at each step and that means more costs
and the higher the costs the greater the
risk to investors and the less likely
our great idea would ever be able to
help anyone
after I time to absorb this in I shook
off the disappointment rolled up my
sleeves and got to work
I put a ton of thought into how we could
adopt this approach and from that
initial disappointment and all the
passion and the pain our principle of
radical simplicity was born this is how
we turned failure into success came up
with actionable solutions and secured
all of those millions of dollars in
funding radical simplicity is the art
and discipline of reducing a problem to
its essence
so you can solve it quickly in a way
that can be practical in the real world
the secret is the secret is to put all
of your deep complex nuanced thinking
into breaking down and defining the
problem in the simplest possible terms
believe it or not that is the hardest
part now sometimes you need to start
from the complex to get to a proof of
concept and then simplify as much as
possible and sometimes you need to
accept a certain degree of complexity as
a necessary evil but radical simplicity
is all about cutting through the chaos
to uncover what we need to learn to
construct a viable solution it’s all
about the insights that we gain along
the way I have never worked on a problem
where we understood it from the
beginning and I strongly believe that
overly complex solutions are the direct
result of not spending enough time or
effort to define the problem this
principle has helped us to come up with
effective approaches for everything from
skin allergies to arthritis radical
simplicity applies to all fields not
just biomedical engineering labs radical
simplicity is based on three key
questions first do we understand the
territory start by understanding the
best result that anyone has ever
achieved for the problem that you’re
focused on this shows you the threshold
that you need to surpass to get your
colleagues investors partners and the
public excited and engaged that’s your
target
understanding the territory also means
asking why previous approaches led to
poor outcomes what are the most likely
reasons that others fail to completely
address the problem then it’s all about
constructing models to test how you can
address each of those failure points and
for this to work you need to narrow the
territory of possibilities by making
testable
some shins and taking leaps of faith
it’s during this process that insights
emerge for a radically simple solution
second radical simplicity asks what
filters should reapply filtering means
we need to eliminate ideas by thinking
in extremely practical terms about how
our clever idea is gonna be put into
practice you need to bake these filters
in right from the beginning not wait
till the end and then tack on
practicality is an afterthought for
example in my lab we eliminate ideas if
we don’t have a clear road to securing a
patent or to manufacturing our
technology if we can’t come up with a
practical solution we go back to
defining the territory our brilliant
idea is not brilliant enough yet to be
radically simple third radical
simplicity means asking how do we know
we’re on the right track and the answer
is constant feedback when your leis are
focused on solving a problem you can be
vulnerable to overlooking something you
need fresh eyes to look at what you’ve
been working on and test your thinking
this principle has been used in all
kinds of industries consider Pixar yes
Pixar the incredibly successful
animation studio that brought us Toy
Story The Incredibles and so many others
Pixar has the world’s best animators and
storytellers and directors yet they all
know that the first version of any of
their movies will suck these are their
so instead of only showing Finnish films
to test audiences they shall partially
completed films and scenes too many
groups of people throughout the entire
filmmaking process and they are very
very very systematic about this well if
it’s good enough for Pixar it’s got to
be good enough for us to test our ideas
we have assembled a group of highly
specialized experts from a variety of
fields from outside
lab they know how to put our ideas and
plans in the pressure cooker and provide
feedback to see if we’ve left anything
out or made any assumptions that we
shouldn’t have
they are our fresh eyes our test
audience so that’s radical simplicity
fully understand the territory filter
with practicality in mind and road test
your ideas with feedback right from the
get-go after our stem cell project had
died we attempted to put radical
simplicity into practice for the very
first time we’ve resurrected our dream
for a stem-cell therapy but this time
this time we define the territory to
include the manufacturing which we had
left out before and this was critical
for problem definition to keep the
manufacturing challenge as low risk as
possible
we started by selecting from the
simplest available materials to filter
with a patent landscape in mind I
developed a good working relationship
with our patent office doing something
simpler than others can help us to
secure patents to manage execution and
feedback
I began by developing feedback
relationships feedback relationships
with lawyers entrepreneurs innovators
reimbursement and regulatory experts and
many others their input can help us to
develop our filters and help us to
identify potential partners for our
technology our first attempt at radical
simplicity gave us the results we had
been hoping for
we developed a cell engineering strategy
that only used a single step we licensed
it to a biotech company that has plans
to bring it to market in the coming
years not bad for radical simplicity’s
very first test run as we continue to
use radical simplicity we were getting
an education in those filters that I was
telling you about if you can build your
Moonrock
with off-the-shelf components go ahead
and do that that’s a big lesson that we
learned while working on a small problem
one night I noticed my ring finger was
red and itchy was this some type of omen
a reaction to my marriage perhaps I’ve
researched my symptoms and realized that
I was allergic
not to my marriage but to the nickel in
my wedding ring nickel is one of the
most common causes of skin reactions and
I was part of the 9 percent 9 percent of
the world’s population for whom this can
be mild to debilitating but I was
surprised to find no safe and effective
approaches existed to prevent this I saw
it as an opportunity for my lab could we
develop a sunscreen like barrier
approach for contact allergies where
nickel could bind to particles on the
skin surface that could easily be washed
away being a science nerd I immediately
gravitated towards complexity how could
we synthesize a whole new material to
achieve this it’s gonna be amazing I
stopped myself then and there no no no
no we needed to keep this simple we
turned to the list of agents that exist
in all kinds of consumer goods like
foods exist in massive quantities and
have a long history of human in human
use I had no idea that such a list
exists but it does and it’s called the
generally recognizes safe list and using
anything from that list would be well
right off the bat easier alright
radically simple we discovered that
calcium carbonate particles good old
chalk could effectively capture nickel
ions and remain on the skin surface
allowing them to be removed with a
simple water rinse 24 months later we
published our findings our steady was
was featured on the home page of CNN and
people started writing in
two years later we had started a company
and run a small successful clinical
study and one year later we had a stable
scaled product regulated as a cosmetic
being sold in pharmacies around the
world and now now it’s even available on
Amazon isn’t that today’s measure of
success the product worked quite well
for me without any ring finger
inflammation and it’s been effective for
about 80% 80% of people who have tried
it including a ballerina who had been
plagued by the nickel in the clasps of
her shoes people have told me that this
product has given them a sense of
freedom that they never had before and
it’s because it’s radically simple you’d
be amazed how often I think back to that
critical pivotal conversation that I had
with the investor who at the time
seemingly dashed my hopes
since my lab has adopted the principles
of radical simplicity we’ve been able to
simplify our stem-cell therapy even more
we discovered small molecules that can
directly target stem cells and
progenitor cells in the body no cell
isolation no cell manufacturing and no
cell delivery required why is that such
a big deal because now we can use
standard drugs to regenerate damaged
human tissues this radically simplified
stem cell therapy is now the subject of
an ongoing clinical study to help
patients with chronic hearing loss can
you imagine the gift that this would
bring people there has never been a drug
that can actually restore their hearing
but we believe we’re on the verge of
having one it’s radically simple and
frankly one of the most exciting things
that we’ve ever done and the basis for a
new company that I co-founded and it all
started with that defining moment of
failure with the wise investor
when you know the territory filter with
practicality in mind and do continual
testing with feedback from a trusted
network of fresh eyes it creates a win
win win for everyone involved it’s a win
for our lab it’s a win for our investors
and most of all it’s a big win for the
people we are ultimately trying to serve
the patients and the public and that is
why I strongly believe that radical
simplicity opens new exciting paths to
continual innovation in all fields as
Apple da Vinci and the aerospace
engineers like to say when it comes to
technology simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication so if your dream is to
create big breakthroughs that help real
people in the real world I invite you to
try something truly radical embrace the
sophistication of simplicity thank you [Applause]
failure i have ever had in my
professional life turned into the
launching pad from my laboratory to spin
out six companies that have been funded
to the tune of a hundred and eighty
million dollars these companies are
already changing people’s lives now how
the heck did that happen at my lab we’re
all about harnessing our imaginations to
dream up ideas for new technologies that
have never been achieved I’d say we get
excited pretty easily and sometimes we
are vulnerable to letting our enthusiasm
run away with us and that has led us
down the wrong path several years ago
one of the first big ideas we dreamed up
was in the area of stem-cell therapy we
wanted to see if we could infuse cells
into a patient’s bloodstream and then
program those cells to travel anywhere
they needed to go imagine specially
programmed stem cells that could travel
to the bones to treat osteoporosis or
wounds to accelerate healing or to the
gut to alleviate inflammatory bowel
disease or to the joints to treat
arthritis the possibility seemed
limitless well for the men and women at
my lab the idea of program stem cell
therapy was too exciting to leave in the
wouldn’t it be cool stage so in 2007 as
the first major project in my brand new
lab we decided to try this for real and
by 2009 we had made some exciting
progress I called a local investor and
described how we were able to improve
the homing of in few cells to sites of
inflammation he agreed to
me to talk about the possibilities I saw
a big future I was really excited I
described the technology and our data of
course what I hope to hear was
congratulations Jeff you and your team
are about to change the world world oh
but that’s not what happens
not even close he said look Jeff this
will make a great academic paper but
it’s just too complicated for us to fund
it’s too risky needless to say I was
kind of devastated our last two years of
work the first major project in my lab
looked like a complete failure we had
developed a complex process that worked
but we hadn’t even considered all the
challenges that our invention would face
on route to the commercial marketplace
how could we have made such a basic
mistake well there are a couple of
reasons the first place that we fell
short was that without realizing it we
had bought in to a giant myth in
academia there’s an unwritten code that
the more complex you can make something
and succeed the more recognition you can
secure by publishing in a high-impact
journal for example so there’s a premium
on complexity but there’s another reason
we didn’t get the reaction we had hoped
for naively I had always thought that
the hard part was getting something to
work in the lab and the rest would be
taken care of by the entrepreneurs or
companies that licensed our technologies
surely they’d be able to take what we
did and quickly bring it to patients
right wrong I was totally wrong that
investor taught us an important lesson
if you want to translate your vision
into medical practice you will need to
come up with simpler approaches now on
first hearing this may sound like the
Wester was advocating the KISS principle
does anyone know what that stands for
keep it simple stupid but the investor
wasn’t saying dumb it down he was making
a different point altogether in 1977
Apple computers first slogan was
simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication that quote is often
credited to Leonardo da Vinci and has
become a credo of a generation of
aerospace engineers simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication why is that idea
so powerful let me answer that question
with a metaphor lots of brilliant
engineers can build a rocket to the moon
with a 1 trillion dollar budget and 10
million custom-made parts but to build a
working moon rocket with a limited
number of only off-the-shelf components
well that takes more than brilliance
that takes genius we could quibble over
the numbers but that’s the kind of
simplicity the investor was referring to
he showed us that the more complex our
technologies the more difficult they’d
be to manufacture and do quality control
at each step and that means more costs
and the higher the costs the greater the
risk to investors and the less likely
our great idea would ever be able to
help anyone
after I time to absorb this in I shook
off the disappointment rolled up my
sleeves and got to work
I put a ton of thought into how we could
adopt this approach and from that
initial disappointment and all the
passion and the pain our principle of
radical simplicity was born this is how
we turned failure into success came up
with actionable solutions and secured
all of those millions of dollars in
funding radical simplicity is the art
and discipline of reducing a problem to
its essence
so you can solve it quickly in a way
that can be practical in the real world
the secret is the secret is to put all
of your deep complex nuanced thinking
into breaking down and defining the
problem in the simplest possible terms
believe it or not that is the hardest
part now sometimes you need to start
from the complex to get to a proof of
concept and then simplify as much as
possible and sometimes you need to
accept a certain degree of complexity as
a necessary evil but radical simplicity
is all about cutting through the chaos
to uncover what we need to learn to
construct a viable solution it’s all
about the insights that we gain along
the way I have never worked on a problem
where we understood it from the
beginning and I strongly believe that
overly complex solutions are the direct
result of not spending enough time or
effort to define the problem this
principle has helped us to come up with
effective approaches for everything from
skin allergies to arthritis radical
simplicity applies to all fields not
just biomedical engineering labs radical
simplicity is based on three key
questions first do we understand the
territory start by understanding the
best result that anyone has ever
achieved for the problem that you’re
focused on this shows you the threshold
that you need to surpass to get your
colleagues investors partners and the
public excited and engaged that’s your
target
understanding the territory also means
asking why previous approaches led to
poor outcomes what are the most likely
reasons that others fail to completely
address the problem then it’s all about
constructing models to test how you can
address each of those failure points and
for this to work you need to narrow the
territory of possibilities by making
testable
some shins and taking leaps of faith
it’s during this process that insights
emerge for a radically simple solution
second radical simplicity asks what
filters should reapply filtering means
we need to eliminate ideas by thinking
in extremely practical terms about how
our clever idea is gonna be put into
practice you need to bake these filters
in right from the beginning not wait
till the end and then tack on
practicality is an afterthought for
example in my lab we eliminate ideas if
we don’t have a clear road to securing a
patent or to manufacturing our
technology if we can’t come up with a
practical solution we go back to
defining the territory our brilliant
idea is not brilliant enough yet to be
radically simple third radical
simplicity means asking how do we know
we’re on the right track and the answer
is constant feedback when your leis are
focused on solving a problem you can be
vulnerable to overlooking something you
need fresh eyes to look at what you’ve
been working on and test your thinking
this principle has been used in all
kinds of industries consider Pixar yes
Pixar the incredibly successful
animation studio that brought us Toy
Story The Incredibles and so many others
Pixar has the world’s best animators and
storytellers and directors yet they all
know that the first version of any of
their movies will suck these are their
so instead of only showing Finnish films
to test audiences they shall partially
completed films and scenes too many
groups of people throughout the entire
filmmaking process and they are very
very very systematic about this well if
it’s good enough for Pixar it’s got to
be good enough for us to test our ideas
we have assembled a group of highly
specialized experts from a variety of
fields from outside
lab they know how to put our ideas and
plans in the pressure cooker and provide
feedback to see if we’ve left anything
out or made any assumptions that we
shouldn’t have
they are our fresh eyes our test
audience so that’s radical simplicity
fully understand the territory filter
with practicality in mind and road test
your ideas with feedback right from the
get-go after our stem cell project had
died we attempted to put radical
simplicity into practice for the very
first time we’ve resurrected our dream
for a stem-cell therapy but this time
this time we define the territory to
include the manufacturing which we had
left out before and this was critical
for problem definition to keep the
manufacturing challenge as low risk as
possible
we started by selecting from the
simplest available materials to filter
with a patent landscape in mind I
developed a good working relationship
with our patent office doing something
simpler than others can help us to
secure patents to manage execution and
feedback
I began by developing feedback
relationships feedback relationships
with lawyers entrepreneurs innovators
reimbursement and regulatory experts and
many others their input can help us to
develop our filters and help us to
identify potential partners for our
technology our first attempt at radical
simplicity gave us the results we had
been hoping for
we developed a cell engineering strategy
that only used a single step we licensed
it to a biotech company that has plans
to bring it to market in the coming
years not bad for radical simplicity’s
very first test run as we continue to
use radical simplicity we were getting
an education in those filters that I was
telling you about if you can build your
Moonrock
with off-the-shelf components go ahead
and do that that’s a big lesson that we
learned while working on a small problem
one night I noticed my ring finger was
red and itchy was this some type of omen
a reaction to my marriage perhaps I’ve
researched my symptoms and realized that
I was allergic
not to my marriage but to the nickel in
my wedding ring nickel is one of the
most common causes of skin reactions and
I was part of the 9 percent 9 percent of
the world’s population for whom this can
be mild to debilitating but I was
surprised to find no safe and effective
approaches existed to prevent this I saw
it as an opportunity for my lab could we
develop a sunscreen like barrier
approach for contact allergies where
nickel could bind to particles on the
skin surface that could easily be washed
away being a science nerd I immediately
gravitated towards complexity how could
we synthesize a whole new material to
achieve this it’s gonna be amazing I
stopped myself then and there no no no
no we needed to keep this simple we
turned to the list of agents that exist
in all kinds of consumer goods like
foods exist in massive quantities and
have a long history of human in human
use I had no idea that such a list
exists but it does and it’s called the
generally recognizes safe list and using
anything from that list would be well
right off the bat easier alright
radically simple we discovered that
calcium carbonate particles good old
chalk could effectively capture nickel
ions and remain on the skin surface
allowing them to be removed with a
simple water rinse 24 months later we
published our findings our steady was
was featured on the home page of CNN and
people started writing in
two years later we had started a company
and run a small successful clinical
study and one year later we had a stable
scaled product regulated as a cosmetic
being sold in pharmacies around the
world and now now it’s even available on
Amazon isn’t that today’s measure of
success the product worked quite well
for me without any ring finger
inflammation and it’s been effective for
about 80% 80% of people who have tried
it including a ballerina who had been
plagued by the nickel in the clasps of
her shoes people have told me that this
product has given them a sense of
freedom that they never had before and
it’s because it’s radically simple you’d
be amazed how often I think back to that
critical pivotal conversation that I had
with the investor who at the time
seemingly dashed my hopes
since my lab has adopted the principles
of radical simplicity we’ve been able to
simplify our stem-cell therapy even more
we discovered small molecules that can
directly target stem cells and
progenitor cells in the body no cell
isolation no cell manufacturing and no
cell delivery required why is that such
a big deal because now we can use
standard drugs to regenerate damaged
human tissues this radically simplified
stem cell therapy is now the subject of
an ongoing clinical study to help
patients with chronic hearing loss can
you imagine the gift that this would
bring people there has never been a drug
that can actually restore their hearing
but we believe we’re on the verge of
having one it’s radically simple and
frankly one of the most exciting things
that we’ve ever done and the basis for a
new company that I co-founded and it all
started with that defining moment of
failure with the wise investor
when you know the territory filter with
practicality in mind and do continual
testing with feedback from a trusted
network of fresh eyes it creates a win
win win for everyone involved it’s a win
for our lab it’s a win for our investors
and most of all it’s a big win for the
people we are ultimately trying to serve
the patients and the public and that is
why I strongly believe that radical
simplicity opens new exciting paths to
continual innovation in all fields as
Apple da Vinci and the aerospace
engineers like to say when it comes to
technology simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication so if your dream is to
create big breakthroughs that help real
people in the real world I invite you to
try something truly radical embrace the
sophistication of simplicity thank you [Applause]
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