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The Semmelweis myth and why it's not true (2018)

To create a real impact on the world is no simple thing. Innovation is never a single event, but a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and those things rarely happen in the same place. That’s why effective innovators are great collaborators.

I was serving on an expert panel at a recent innovation conference and an attendee asked about the Semmelweis effect, the tendency for people to reject new evidence that contradicts established beliefs. His mental state steadily declined and he was eventually confined to a medical institution, where he died, in morbid irony, from an infection he contracted under care. Semmelweis, thinking his results were enough, didn’t see the value in communicating his work effectively, formatting his publications clearly or even collecting data in a manner that would gain his ideas greater acceptance.

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