Robots Doing Surgery!

One of the tests for whether an idea or possibility can be considered an innovation and a breakthrough is to reflect back, before the innovation and breakthrough is a fact and remember the reaction on first hearing about it.

Innovator: "I have an idea! What about we design a robot to do surgery?"
Audience: "That's a crazy idea! Are you being serious?"
Innovator: "Absolutely, Let me explain..."
Audience: "Doing surgery on humans? Are you serious? That will never fly because..."

After the fact, we discover all the ideas supporters, even co-inventors.

Well, The Chicago Sun Times has just such an "after the fact" story, Robots with Scalpels a Better way to do Surgery.

From the article:

"Robotic surgery, no longer something out of a sci-fi novel, has become an increasingly popular way to do minimally invasive operations.

Surgeons at more than two dozen Illinois hospitals, including the University of Chicago Medical Center and Advocate Christ Medical Center, use the "da Vinci" robot to operate on the prostate, heart and other organs while sitting yards away from the operating table. About 85,000 robot-assisted surgeries were performed nationwide last year... read on

One of the hallmarks in innovative thinkers, of people who have a track record of producing breakthroughs, is their capacity to speak ideas that are ahead of their peers, or their industry, with an unwavering commitment to their idea even as experts regale them with all the reasons it wont work, "it's not possible", and all its variants down the seemingly endless litany of yeabuts.

To borrow from one of Apple's (a great example of innovators) ads, Here's to the Crazy Ones. Before the fact, some ideas we now take for granted, did seem crazy. Some of my favorites - GPS navigation on my iPhone; Google search and retrieve information about just about everything in seconds; Skype video calls; Google Earth;... the list is huge. Add your own favorites.