Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a team sport, it's a relay race.
Our society loves to romanticize the idea of the single, solo inventor who, working late in the lab one night, makes an earthshaking discovery, and voila, overnight everything's changed. That's a very appealing picture; however, it's just not true. Medicine today is a team sport.
Crazy to think that we're having surgery, we're trying to excise cancer, we don't know where the cancer is. We're trying to preserve nerves; we can't see where they are.