Borrowing Innovative Solutions from Mother Nature

Jeff Karp, bio-inspiration evangelist, leverages evolutionary tricks to develop medical products inspired by the likes of parasitic worms and gecko lizards.

“Evolution is the best problem solver,” said Jeff Karp in his 2014 TEDMED talk. Which is why the Harvard scientist leverages bio-inspiration, an emerging scientific specialty that looks at how plants and animals deal with complex challenges, to develop medical devices and products that, for instance, can be used to close up human wounds.

To date, Karp and his lab colleagues at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed skin graft adhesives based on spiny-headed parasitic worms, cancer-detecting molecules that move like jellyfish, surgical staples that mimic barbed porcupine quills, and waterproof surgical bandages inspired by the feet of gecko lizards. With all of the natural world available to guide them, they continue to forge new innovations in regenerative medicine, surgical science, and stem cell engineering that have laid the foundation for six companies, including Skintifique, Gecko Biomedical, Alivio Therapeutics, and Frequency Therapeutics.

Success in biomedical engineering means finding ways to harness creativity while respecting the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology — no small feat. But Mother Nature has more than a few tricks up her sleeve to help. And those tips allow Karp, and bioengineers like him, to design and build safe, innovative, and leading-edge medical technologies that can aid clinicians in their quest to treat patients with a variety of serious conditions.

Here, Karp explains the importance of building multidisciplinary alliances to brainstorm effectively, why defining the problem is critical for problem-solving, and the true difference, in his opinion, between creativity and innovation.

How to kill groupthink

I make sure my lab is multidisciplinary and multicultural — people from different backgrounds and places, with different skills to offer. I think of it this way: I want to minimize the overlap in expertise in my laboratory. That way, when we are sitting around a table brainstorming, trying to come up with a particular solution, everyone can bring a unique perspective to the problem. It’s not just about getting good ideas, although that’s important; it’s also about encouraging people. Everyone feels validated, since no one else has that particular perspective. And with that validation, they are more willing to give their all, which makes our lab a very free-flowing, idea-generating, creativity-emerging, groupthink-quashing environment.

Bio-inspiration 101

Some people consider bio-inspiration as a field, but we consider it a tool that we use to break free from conventional thinking and come up with new ideas. Every living thing on the planet, every plant and animal, is still here because it managed to evolve to deal with some pretty weird challenges. Mother Nature has come up with unique ways to tackle all those different problems. And we can look to those solutions to help inspire our work in medicine.

Fully understand the problem

One of the greatest challenges to being creative is really understanding the problem you are trying to solve — not just that the problem exists or how many people are affected, but the actual biology of that problem. You need to know what has been tried before, what successes have been achieved to date, the limitations and drawbacks that clinicians have with existing technologies, and what the end-user experience really needs to be for those clinicians to even bother trying something new. The creative process can only take you so far if you aren’t working a well-defined problem.

But once you can define that problem, helped by the insights of people who really understand the space, the excitement builds up. That’s when the creative juices really start flowing. That’s when you can find a path forward.

Born creative

I agree with Ken Robinson, the famous TED speaker, that everyone is born super-creative. It just gets educated out of you. And if you are in science and engineering, you may be at an even bigger disadvantage. You have to work by the scientific method. It’s a very rigorous approach that requires discipline. It sometimes feels like the more disciplined you are, the better scientist you are — but the harder it is to be creative.

That’s why having kids has helped me. Adults have so much judgment, so many ideas of what can’t be done. Kids, though, they are fresh. They don’t judge as much. They don’t know yet that they have to play by the rules. If kids want to dance? They dance! They don’t need other people dancing or even music. Adults often do. My kids have this free-flowing expression of themselves, and it’s very inspiring to me. It helps me tune out some of those “rules” and bring out my own creativity.

Creativity vs. innovation

Is it creative to develop something that doesn’t work? I don’t know. Probably if it can be used to gain critical insights and it helps you to come up with new ideas. But, ultimately, I’m here to develop solutions that will help people. Innovation, I think, is something that can only be retrospectively defined, meaning we cannot claim that we are innovative until we’ve actually helped somebody. And that’s what, with every problem I’m trying to solve, I want to be able to do.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.