"The Demon Under the Microscope" - innovation lessons you can use

The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug, by Thomas Hager is the story of the discovery of sulfa drugs.  I listened to the unabridged CD version on this week's drive to Houston, TX and back, and picked up a few lessons on innovation that might be useful in your work.

Sulfa drugs, invented in the 1930s, were the first truly effective anti-bacterials.  The book is the story of their invention.

Here are some lessons on innovation:

• Innovation actually takes a lot of people - very few real breakthroughs are the product of one person working alone in a lab.  Sulfa drugs were no exception, in spite of the book's subtitle.  While the book does follow the sulfa story very much from the viewpoint of one doctor at Bayer in Germany, it makes clear that hundreds of people played a hand in the innovation.  Not only did contemporary chemists, other doctors, other companies and other countries play a role, but sulfa drugs were the culmination of decades (centuries) of medical progress.

• Innovation is the result of persistence rather than inspiration.  The Bayer team systematically modified chemicals and then tested each modification rigorously.  The first successful anti-bacterial compound was somewhere around the 700th one tested.

• Innovation requires both method and intuition.  The successful Bayer research program began with an intuition that the mechanisms that made cloth dies more "fast" would also help bind drugs to bacteria.  But the breakthrough came as a result of a very methodical program of small modifications to dies, followed by testing, followed by more small modifications.

• Innovation also seems to require a touch of luck.  Bayer developed the first sulfa drug, which was a sulfonamide molecule attached to an azzo dye molecule.  A French lab reverse engineered the compound and began its own tests on mice.  They apparently had extra mice, and had extra quantities of pure sulfonamide.  On a whim, a lab assistant decided to test the anti-bacterial properties of sulfonamide alone.  Turns out it was much better than the Bayer compound.  That bit of luck and whimsy was what drove the real revolution in drug treatment.

• The spoils of innovation often fail to acrue to the original innovator.  In the sulfa drugs example, as noted above, a tiny amount of lucky work by the French ended up making Bayer's key innovation much less valuable on the market.