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Is innovation an empty promise?

No, but it does require effort from both the dental professional and the manufacturers. Click here for Part 2.

By Thais Carter, Editor in Chief

Invention is easier than you might think. Engineers have the knowledge to, when paired with the right resources, yield numerous new products. Don’t be fooled, however—ease and efficacy are two different things.

At the Aberdeen Group’s Product Innovation Executive Summit held in Chicago this spring—addressing industry broadly, not dentistry specifically—keynote speaker Andrew Brown, Executive Director and Chief Technologist of Delphi Corp., a world leader in mobile electronics, transportation components, and systems technology, was clear: Invention alone is insufficient. Invention combined with insight is what drives true innovation. “It’s the difference between products that are engineering driven versus market driven. Focusing only on engineering creates products looking for markets. Customers and manufacturers each benefit more when the market establishes the agenda for new ideas.

“The speed of progress,” he continued, “is driven by listening.”

If you had to choose, what side would dentistry fall on? As a dentist, as a consumer, do you feel as though your practice needs are setting the agenda for advancement?

Dental manufacturers say yes, but typically leisurely adoption rates (even before the economic slump), may suggest otherwise.

The pace of change
As Brown defines it, innovation is an ever-evolving process that allows for the creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace. In dentistry, customer value can be hard to pinpoint since the needs of the approximately 160,000 U.S. dentists can seem so varied. There are technophiles, traditionalists, and thousands of people in between.

What most people in the industry can agree on is that, even with the varied mix, change is slow to come to dentistry. “Technology in the dental industry doesn’t really move as fast as other industries,” Alex di Sessa, VP of Marketing for Zap Lasers, observed. “If you look at laptops, the cell phone, everything related to computers — they move at a much faster pace. The life cycle of dental equipment is between 5 and 7 years. That’s pretty long.”

“Our industry is one in which changes take place more slowly over time,” Joe Sakaduski, a 20-year veteran of the dental industry and co-founder of Sakaduski Marketing Solutions, agreed. But the pace of change in dental is not predetermined by a lack of ideas; no, industry leaders — from materials to high-tech equipment manufacturers — all shared that ideas are abundant, driven mostly by customer feedback. It’s the issue of adoption that makes the difference.

Sakaduski sees digitization, and digital radiography specifically, as a perfect illustration. “Digitization is an example where there was a sense of innovation, but if you look, there was a long adoption curve, so it didn’t really seem like innovation,” he said. “When it first came out, when Schick first introduced digital x-ray 10 or 12 years ago, it was very innovative. That seems less true today because everyone is trying to digitize what they’re doing, but I think Schick, at the time, was a truly innovative company. They were trying to innovate an entire spectrum of business and go from one way to another. They knew they would run into a lot of opposition from the dentist who isn’t always necessarily looking for innovation.”

This is the paradox of innovation in dentistry: Customer needs drive new products, but customer behavior hinders adoption. In technology surveys conducted by Dental Products Report over the last decade, the majority of respondents consistently identify themselves as “cautious, but curious,” with another quarter consistently describing themselves as “conservative, wait and see.” This belies a dentist’s fundamental lack of trust, either in the company to deliver on its promise, or in him or herself to actually execute. Manufacturers are working vigorously to help on both counts.

Trusting the company

Dr. Lou Shuman, President of the Pride Institute and former VP of Strategic Relations for Align Technology, believes that innovation is very important to the average dentist. “However, it is very difficult to recognize who the true innovators are,” he said. “This is due to the bombardment of marketing that many times is associated with a change in a manufacturer’s product portfolio. It is for this reason the need for unbiased assessment, like what Gordon Christensen’s Clinicians Report (formerly CRA) provides, is critical in order for the community to be able to differentiate between true innovations versus hype.”

Dr. Christensen, through audience participation at the Clinicians Report Annual “Dentistry Update Course”, has witnessed that dentists are very perceptive concerning truth versus hype. “The typical dentist is interested in innovation, assuming that ‘new concepts’ could be better than previously available ones. However, many times dentists find that new products can be more expensive, time-consuming, and not as acceptable as previously available proven concepts and techniques. However, after adequate basic research and clinician use, many new and innovative products improve clinical treatment.”

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