Innovation is interdisciplinary: ITT Siemens Healthineers experience

The more I am rotating in the Life Sciences topics, the more I understand that the nature of perceptible innovation is interdisciplinary. No, even more, the collaboration of many tiers of work fields - science, buisness, application engineers and users, but also regulation commitees, and this list surely does not end here… So I have asked myself: how does it feel like to collaborate “outside of my pot” - which up to the moment was mostly computational modelling in the academic environment or working in a company on engineering solutions - and go “in the open” to meet the buisness people, people working with Big Data, people doing experimental research. And together try to create a new concept that will benefit humanity. This has brought me to apply to Siemens Healthineers, and I was really glad to have been accepted. I am grateful to all the organizers for the time they took to present ITT concepts and pick the teams, amongst the other things! So we were introduced into the methodology, started working, and… it was a real mishmash. Scientific people seeing an “ideal world” in what we develop, engineering part telling that these “ideals” are not realistic and do not comply to the timeframe of the program, buisness people seeing this debate as a waste of time because “there is nothing apparent to sell” - at first, I did not really believe that such a teamwork really can bring anything other than burnt nerves. But it surprisingly did! At some point, through our common unwillingness to fight, group became listening to each other. Suddenly, we have found a way to add this miraculous “individual added value” of each participant to the concept. I have realized that all of the others' points are right - and highlight the potential problems or questions customers or jury could have! We ended up elaborating a single concept based on many discussions. The nature of how this came from total chaos to the order yet eludes me. As a result, in just 3 (!) days we, a group of merely strangers at some moments behaving like a circular firing squad, have went to identifying our strengths and weaknesses, elaborating a single conept and presenting it to the wider audience. Furthermore, we have acquired a 3rd place out of 9 teams. It was also very interesting to see other groups' presentations, which have been more or less coordinated than ours - to the outside :) For me, ITT Healthineers was a big learning: patience and listening to others are hard, but open new perspectives. And while it can be daunting and unpleasant at first, it helps to elaborate the concept and the solutions much more carefully, which reduces the “work debt” of “repairing the hull” later. Moreover, I feel like speaking up and gathering in teams of interdisciplinary people is already a step forward from sitting “in the own pot” and hoping on some superficial power to align buisness with science and theoretical with applied research.

TL;DR Team with different backgrounds is a really annoying thing that however benefits the resulting concept enormously, combining perspectives and views to broaden horizons.