By Jane La Mantia de Pencier

Sitting in my garden watching a squirrel flow over and under fences with no acknowledgement of a barrier, other than the navigational one, I’m thinking of that critter’s open source attitude. He seems to be of the mind that all’s available to him and it’s available for his use and sustenance. Looking at Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, I’m thinking about how the salons of Paris in the late 1700s compare to the birth of the internet and even to the Innovation Cell of which I’m a part.

I guess it’s pretty obvious. It’s all about sharing transformative ideas and collaboration and evolving to a new social place. Maybe the last notion needs to be highlighted in a definition of innovation. Maybe innovation is not just about newness: it’s also about propulsion.

By the 1770s , Schama writes, the attendance at the Salon Carré of the Louvre was a “huge boiling soup of humanity.” It’s all described by a journalist of the time in the most florid language of disgust about the shoulder to shoulder odour and filth. The journalist found the lesser classes smellier than the noble, but something tells me, they were all rather malodorous. Anyway, they stuck around wafting up their personal fumes and talking about all sorts of things. Schama writes about the “forming of a single public” as people of all classes partook in the discussions. There were elite salons, too, where an invitation was required and coveted, and where a young intellectual might be the star attraction amongst a bunch of older established types. Rousseau had a good time enjoying much hospitality at these thinkery soirées. There was debate. There was also the ignition of something powerful, maybe curiosity. Sure, that whole French exercise moved toward the problematic. The revolution was unrelenting, brutish. Many of the artists who had discovered a new voice in this milieu were very active in its dismantling. Apparently the poets and the clowns, the playwrights, acrobats and painters became some of the most effective citizens in the rounding up of necks for that killing machine, the guillotine (an innovation in its ugly form).

Yes, innovation sometimes comes in a raucous fashion. Things started out looking pretty festive in France with the big social mix. All classes of society enjoyed watching hot air balloons and street festivals. They enjoyed the discussion and ideas, but once the people of all classes became more knowledgeable and started to communicate with each other, they wanted more in their daily lives. They wanted liberté, égalité, fraternité. Well, it’s hard to argue with that. Those are really pretty good things to strive for and that’s what the Web offers in 2009. We all have access to a wide swath of ubiquitous, real-time information. It’s available to us instantly. We’re seeking it out, and with it we’re conversing with a social network from around the world. It is, indeed, “world-wide”.

Healthcare and liberté, égalité, fraternité

Healthcare has been informed by this new age of information. We want our healthcare experience to be better, perfect even. We want liberté, égalité, fraternité. We want to be fully informed about our maladies and possible treatments before we show up in the doctors’ offices. We certainly are more informed, if not fully informed. We want our doctors to discuss with us what we know. Some doctors find these Internet-educated patients difficult. They sometimes have the wrong information or supposedly superficial points of view. Almost every day, the patient who walks into a doctor’s office is an entirely new species. The patient on Tuesday who has the same trouble as the patient on Monday may have an entirely different, or an updated, bank of information at their disposal. Availability of information is on a seeming logarithmic expansion, and patients’ access to new thinking and community is now instant. This instant information revealed the flaws in the banking systems. This same phenomenon in healthcare does not have to be threatening. It can be used positively. This instant information can be used to make the healthcare experience fantastically efficient and hopefully, effective.

Will these new intellectual salons, online chat rooms, websites, or Twitter mico-diaries lead to a rising up of people and a great bloody unrest? Will there be a tumultuous revolution of our healthcare system? No, I don’t think so, because *everyone* is a participant. As healthcare workers, patients, government health bodies, insurance and pharmaceutical companies and their distributors all join the conversation we’ll be a happy mass of health seeking individuals.

I’ll be sitting in my garden imagining an entertaining metaphor for the innovations of our age. The great invention of the late 1700s, the hot air balloon, will open its valves, hiss, plump up and take flight. As it lifts, the garden squirrel will run to the top post of the open source fence, and in a great flying squirrel moment, innovate itself aboard. He’ll leap.

I’ll hold my breath as the massive balloon of our age lifts. Ok, it might have the “Health Strategy Innovation Cell” logo emblazoned on its side. I’ll cheer as it floats up, higher and higher. My neighbours will hear my celebration. They’ll peer through the fence, thinking I’ve come undone. They’ll look to the sky. The balloon will catch the wind. The neighbours will see the ascending balloon. The innovation squirrel will skip along the edge of the basket as he gets smaller and smaller in the sky. All will cheer.

We’ll run out to the street and in a great mob chase the balloon as it travels across the proverbial city of Paris. Sure it might crash, but that’s just the way of innovation, the open source attitude, and the flying squirrel.

Copyright Jane La Mantia de Pencier, 2009.