Insights to Inspire / Digital Products
Innovation Alchemy: Blending Kitchens and Operating Rooms
Martin Bouza
Innovation can come from all that surrounds us. Discover the practice of cross-pollination and how it helps us create outstanding solutions.
Innovation Alchemy: Blending Kitchens and Operating Rooms
Picture this: a surgical team operating on a patient and saving his life. Now, picture this: the chef and his team at your favorite restaurant preparing that dish that you just love. At first glance, these situations seem worlds apart, right? One is all about life-saving, while the other is all about creating culinary delights. But if you keep reading, you’ll see that they are not different after all, and discover how we can take a valuable idea from these similarities.
There’s this incredible concept from Design Thinking called cross-pollination that just amazes me every time. It’s about finding insights and inspiration in unrelated fields to spark innovation and fresh perspectives when designing solutions of all kinds. This means that hidden in a restaurant’s kitchen, there might be ideas to make surgical teams more agile. Or the airline industry might have clues on how to enhance the patient experience in healthcare. It’s a healthy and even humbling practice because it shows us that other industries and people might be on the right track too.
Let’s dig deeper into the comparison between kitchens and operating rooms. Both have elements like:
- a defined hierarchy and roles, who all know what they have to do
- a focus on communication, teamwork and protocols
- specialized skills that often take years to master
- attention to safety and hygiene to deliver the best results
- physical tools for the job that need to be ready before the procedures start
- ability to handle pressure and stress
- effective time management
- adaptability to unforeseen circumstances
When you look at it this way, it becomes clear that the two situations aren’t as wildly different as we thought, and that operating rooms could learn something from how kitchens run their operations. It’s a way to open our minds to new ideas that can have a positive impact. But the key is to find a solution that people will actually use. That’s where our knowledge of anthropology and sociology comes in. If a solution isn’t adopted, even if it’s great, it won’t make a difference. That’s why we focus on traits like usability and ease of use when we create solutions at Arionkoder.
Because we’ve seen remarkable results from the application of cross-pollination, we’ve decided to work across a spectrum of industries. While we primarily focus on helping healthcare-related companies and organizations, we also serve industries such as energy, entertainment, logistics, information management and many others. This approach contributes to finding new avenues of thought in order to build more innovative and disruptive solutions that create better and healthier futures for us all.
This is just one of the ways we at Arionkoder think creatively. We apply design principles to everything we do in a way that’s bigger than just lines of code or beautiful apps. To us, technology is a tool for our mission to craft better futures for humanity, and not the end goal. And we stick to this vision with coherence and belief.
We take pride in giving each client the best possible solution because there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We understand individuals, companies, and industries to create something truly unique that makes a real impact. If you also believe that this is the way forward, I invite you to join us as we reshape the future product by product.