The Innovative Mindset

https://hbr.org/2015/10/the-innovative-mindset-your-company-cant-afford-to-lose

If you're a parent of a little one with T1D, you'll know the routine by now: the constant presence of T1D 24/7. The overnight testing and management. Good job that last bit's only really needed when they're growing, sick, excited, stressed, or came back from a friends house with a total carb guess for a their tea. Did I tell you our little PWD is four? Oh, so that's most of the time? Hmm...

So what to do? 
Well, first, all of us (I guess) will go through the peaks and troughs (so to speak) of managing T1D, you'll learn to live on less sleep than you ever though humanly possible, develop a palm-sized imprint on your forehead and, some days* at least, lose the will to focus on anything other than doing a better job of managing diabetes. You'll read and read, try to make best use of your particular pump and CGM and sigh quietly to yourself at the 45 button pushes it takes to view the current ISIG value at 23:58.

* Bizarrely, this seems to coincide with the less 'glamorous' bits of my day job, you know the paperwork, budget, HR processes etc ;-)

And most of us, I'm guessing, will get up and get back on the T1D-hamster wheel the next day and hope that someone is going to knock on the door with a gift-wrapped solution.

Fortunately for us, not everyone is content with that deal.
Whilst some saw overwhelming obstacles (e.g. building a Artificial Pancreas from scratch) others saw the potential for unlocking the power within existing devices and technologies and set about embarking on a journey make things happen on their timescale.

Probably the best known (but far from only proponent) of this is the Nightscout project. Some refer to the output of this movement as a 'hack' or a 'tweak' (well, it's certainly a pretty big tweak), but I think the 'CGM in the Cloud' tag sums it up perfectly. Your T1D data on your phone, your smart watch way before (years before) Dexcom or Medtronic started to roll out their solutions. And (based on the reviews I've read) its continuous innovation still places it above the official cloud solutions.

A central part of this enterprising core group was Lane Desborough, whose life took a sharp turn in 2009 with the diagnosis of his son Hayden. Lane's path from that point, via Nightscout, Medtronic and now co-founding Bigfoot Biomedical, and the challenges facing the existing and emerging T1D tech companies is charted brilliantly in a new Harvard Business Review article.

Simone Ahuja's article "The Innovative Mindset Your Company Can't Afford to Lose" captures the energy, the courage, to channel the raw emotion that surely a ton of us parents with T1D sons and daughters must feel, turn family life (potentially) upside down and then make things happen. Now.

https://hbr.org/2015/10/the-innovative-mindset-your-company-cant-afford-to-lose

Lane and his colleagues are demonstrating that you don't always need shiny and new i.e. brand new everything. Good, reliable hardware exists. Clever (and impatient) people to develop and explore what could be done also exist (and you're clearly going to need more than one person's intellect and skills to solve this problem). But, more than anything, what's needed is innovative thinking to realise the full potential of whatever you have. From what Jeffrey Brewer said the other night, it appears there's plenty of room for that over at Bigfoot.

The central message of enabling innovators and encouraging problem solvers (so called intrapreneurs) within a group is relevant to organisations large and small, not least the NHS at this critical time in its recent history.

After a long, long day, with multiple extra night-time boluses to keep a new growth spurt (?) BG spike in check and only decaff in the house (I'd should point out I think this is actually my wife looking after me!), The Innovative Mindset was exactly what I needed to read this evening.