I Research Innovation With Medical Device Failure: A Boring Research Topic, Then The World Caught Up

R3ciprocity.com - Prof David Maslach: Innovation; Research Life; Striving Towards Happiness · Jan 5, 2026 · 8m

My research sounds narrow: how do you learn from failure, and how does that turn into innovation.

But “failure” is a misleading word. Once you look closely, it is not one event. It is a messy story. It is nuance. It is trial and error inside real life.

I started in medical technology, staring at adverse event reports. On the surface, it looks simple: one report, one problem. Then you open the text and it is hospital speak, doctor speak, long narratives, and contradictions. Even one “report” can hide thousands of uses, under reporting, or over reporting. The whole thing is hard to read, hard…