October 28, 2022 | Office of the President & Chief Research Officer

This month, I’m focusing on a culture of innovation. Innovation fosters creative, inventive problem-solving. Impactful thinking encourages us to apply ourselves to the greatest effect within our mission. When innovation and impactful thinking are combined, we create meaningful solutions that can measurably advance our mission, make a difference in people’s lives, and be amplified by others’ work. This means more patients, families, and healthcare professionals benefit from improved outcomes, higher quality care, greater access, and more outstanding professional satisfaction through healthcare delivery.

The Innovate2Impact (I2I) Program at Stanley Manne Research Institute serves as an innovation hub for Lurie Children’s in our mission to advance pediatric medicine. Through inventions in care transformation, devices, therapeutics, and diagnostics that are scientifically powerful, health-relevant, and have commercial potential, we can impact the future of children’s health. Innovate2Impact's director, Kaushik (Kosh) Ghosh, MS, MBA (pictured), and his colleague Kelley Elahi, ABSN, MSE, a biomedical engineering-trained pediatric critical care nurse, work to tap into our inner entrepreneurs, inventors, and creators to help us realize that we all have an inner innovator.

The key to unlocking the potential of our medical and research teams is to create a culture of innovation that embeds innovation, impact-minded thinking, and research into our organizational DNA. Essential ingredients include education, inspiration, partnerships between the healthcare industry and academia, and capturing our innovations as intellectual property.  

With over fifty active projects, the Innovate2Impact team is currently working with many partners on projects stemming from our innovations—each with great potential for impact. Here is one exciting example of a recent and noteworthy partnership. Gustave Falciglia, MD, Attending Physician in Neonatology at Lurie Children’s, imagined a way to leverage technology to help clinicians decide the best way to support a baby’s nutritional needs. In a newly founded partnership, Gustave and Medical Predictive Science Corporation worked together on a plan to develop and test a clinical decision support system to enhance nutrition for neonatal growth in the neonatal intensive care unit. The plan was successfully funded by a Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Partnerships like this are critical to solving pediatric health challenges and generating shared revenue that can be available for reinvestment in pursuing new research endeavors.

Please consider how to bring out your inner innovator. If you’re reading this as a bench researcher, practicing clinician, lab administrator, pediatric nurse, or any of the countless team members that comprise our community, I encourage you to contact the Innovate2Impact team to learn how your ideas can be scaled to create meaningful impact in our quest for healthier children and families.

With kindness and respect, 

Pat