Many people view innovation as the lifeblood of progress, especially in healthcare, where discoveries can transform patient outcomes and redefine care delivery. Yet innovation doesn’t happen by accident. Effective innovation that yields results requires deliberate focus, disciplined execution and, above all, prioritization.
These principles have become clear as I’ve established strategic approaches to innovation in the groups and organizations I’ve led. Historically, innovation within lab medicine at Mayo Clinic relied on chance collisions between clinical practice and laboratory medicine. While this grassroots approach produced successes, it lacked strategic intent and resulted in a fragmented approach to innovation. Without an overarching strategy, each division or work area ends up establishing its own priorities, processes and resource allocation.
What I’ve found over time is that it isn’t the lack of ideas that limit innovation; it’s the lack of a shared framework. Below are four takeaways I’ve garnered from successfully leading the refresh and implementation of frameworks to fuel innovation.
1. Prioritization and strategy are the secret weapons.
While prioritization is often underappreciated and can be misconstrued as limiting, it is actually a catalyst that creates space for the most impactful innovations to flourish, and it inspires innovative ideas that advance your organization’s mission. Innovation is inherently risky and resource-intensive, and in healthcare, resources — time, talent and capital — are finite. When you spread these resources across too many projects, progress becomes scattered and inconsistent. The key is to concentrate efforts on fewer, high-impact initiatives to create momentum and deliver measurable results.
Leaders often feel pressure to pursue every new trend, but effective leadership requires making tough choices. Sometimes, saying “no” to good ideas is necessary to protect the truly great ones. By evaluating ideas based on the needs of patients, scalability and alignment with organizational goals, we channel energy toward innovations that matter most and will have lasting value for patients and communities.
A shared innovation strategy across your organization provides the criteria to prioritize initiatives and offers the transparency needed to clarify for everyone how those decisions are made. This allows you to prioritize while keeping staff engaged in generating ideas that best align with your strategy and address the needs of patients.
2. Centralized, dedicated resources are vital.
A key insight from one of my early efforts to revitalize the innovation strategy for a group was that innovation requires dedicated resources. Prior to this effort, we had combined resources for innovation and daily operations, which often meant sacrificing innovation to maintain production. As we looked to rebuild our approach, we met with the former leader of a large medical device organization for an outsider’s perspective. One critical insight from that conversation was the importance of treating innovation as a separate investment, not something embedded in daily operations.
I’ve continued to find value in this approach. I’ve also found it’s best to centralize resource management for projects with the greatest strategic importance within a single group or office, as lack of centralization will often lead to inconsistent resource allocation. In contrast, a central process provides equal access for everyone and simplifies tracking efforts. I’ve discovered this also made it easier to connect teams, share resources and foster collaboration across laboratories and other areas at Mayo Clinic.
3. Stakeholder engagement and clear communication will drive buy-in and alignment.
As leaders, our responsibility is to set priorities collaboratively and communicate them clearly and consistently. Innovation thrives when diverse voices contribute. Leveraging this diversity while focusing resources on the most impactful initiatives requires intentional stakeholder engagement.
When refreshing or creating an approach to innovation, engage key stakeholders early to help shape the strategy and then continue to gather their input on how projects are prioritized. That input from people close to the work not only helps with buy-in as you share your new approach more broadly but also ensures that innovation remains practical and patient-centered.
Once priorities are established, communication becomes critical. This includes communicating them broadly in multiple venues and giving staff opportunities to ask questions to address misconceptions and potential confusion. Teams need to understand how projects are evaluated, why certain projects take precedence and how their efforts connect to the broader vision. Providing this clarity fosters alignment and minimizes innovation fatigue.
4. Regular, data-driven reviews inform pivots while maintaining strategic direction.
A common misconception is that having a structure limits the ability to respond to changes. In reality, the most effective innovation strategies embrace both structure and flexibility. A clear structure provides direction, ensuring that innovation aligns with organizational goals and patient needs, and that the most impactful projects receive adequate resources. At the same time, true strategic leadership recognizes that priorities must shift as circumstances change, especially in healthcare, where evidence and technologies evolve rapidly. An approach that is too rigid can quickly become obsolete.
I’ve seen success in creating an innovation framework that is structured yet adaptable by building in regular review cycles and leaning heavily on data to guide decisions. Whether quarterly or biannually, a dedicated time to evaluate your innovation portfolio enables you to retire projects that no longer serve the mission and pivot toward emerging opportunities. By combining structure with flexibility, you can drive progress more effectively while remaining responsive to the dynamic healthcare landscape.
Building a resilient innovation engine
Innovation in healthcare demands more than ideas. It requires moving beyond fragmented processes and creating a unified framework to drive focus, structure and prioritization. This model centralizes resource management, fosters collaboration and aligns innovation with strategic goals. By combining disciplined execution with adaptability at Mayo Clinic Laboratories, we’ve advanced next-generation diagnostics and built a culture of purposeful innovation that delivers measurable value for patients and the organization.
Dr. Morice is the president and CEO of Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Laboratories, the global leader in turning test results into clinical answers. He holds the academic rank of professor of laboratory medicine and pathology in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, and he is a Mayo Clinic consultant in hematopathology.
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