I'm about to tell you one of the greatest innovation stories of all time that you've probably never heard of. This is the story of the invention of the intraocular lens implant.* It's a story that started with one surgeon's idea, how he was ridiculed for it, and how this idea came to eventually benefit over 10 million people a year with the gift of sight. Here are three lessons I've learned about how innovation works from this story.
1 - Innovation requires curiosity combined with agency.
During World War II, Harold Ridley treated British pilots with eye injuries. He observed that, unlike glass, plastic splinters from the cockpit canopy that became lodged in the eye didn't trigger an inflammatory response. With this insight, he proposed that it was possible to use permanent, artificial lenses implanted into the eye to treat cataracts with similar materials.
In November 1949, he had a lens manufactured using a type of acrylic and achieved the first implant of an intraocular lens at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Ridley's curiosity combined with his agency turned what was a serendipitous observation, into what would become a world-changing innovation.
2- Innovation requires courage and vision.
The conventional surgical practice at the time was for surgeons to routinely take things out of the eye. The concept of implanting a lens into the eye required a pretty radical paradigm shift for surgeons of that era. So radical, that Ridley's colleagues were not able to accept the new thought patterns required to embrace Ridley's idea of an intra-ocular lens for decades.
For the next three decades, Ridley received almost no recognition for his work. Instead, his idea and the operation were dismissed, and he was ridiculed by his British and American peers. Through the '60s, others had tried with different designs to Ridley's with disastrous results - often due to substandard manufacturing and poor designs. The profession soured to the idea as a whole.
Despite this, he had a vision, and he kept working at it. So clear was this vision that some of his papers read today are almost prophetic in the way he predicted modern surgical practices. His courage to work on his vision, stay with his convictions, and go against powerful opposition teaches us what is often required of great innovators.
3- Innovation is incremental.
Cataract extraction with an intraocular lens implant is now the gold standard. However, Ridley's first lens had to be removed due to inflammation only after a year. Subsequently, he went through countless design ideas that had various complications. Different lens shapes, materials, supporting structures were tried - not just by Ridley, but by his peers worldwide.
And this is where the third lesson in great innovation comes in - that great breakthroughs are almost always incremental. Ridley's one brilliant insight sparked a trail of countless others around the world to invent, innovate, and try different ideas. Later innovations such as phacoemulsification in the '60s and the invention of the foldable silicon lens in the '80s were other inflection points in the story of how we've come to our modern, safe surgical techniques. Eventually, Ridley was recognized for his achievements and was knighted in the year 2000.
The best part is how the story ends. Sir Ridley in his retirement, almost 50 years from his initial idea had a successful cataract surgery with intraocular lens implants at St Thomas' Hospital - the very hospital where he performed the first lens insertion.
*Intraocular lenses are artificial plastic lenses placed in the eye after removing the cloudy lens in cataracts.