The first ruling (PLIVA, INC., ET AL. v. MENSING) dealt with the question of whether generic drugs’ warning labels must be updated with new information of possible side effects as they arise, as is required by law for original makers of brand-name drugs. Gladys Mensing and Julie Demahy were prescribed Reglan (metoclopramide) in 2001 and 2002, respectively, to treat their digestive problems, e.g., acid reflux. However, both received a generic form of metoclopramide from their pharmacists, which were not labeled with the possible toxic side effects that had come to light. After taking the drug as prescribed for several years, both women developed tardive dyskinesia, a severe neurological disorder.

The court voted 5-4 in favor of the generic drug companies, absolving them of the requirement to update their warning labels. I believe that Justice Sonia Sotomayer was right on target when she declared, in her minority opinion: “As a result of today’s decision, whether a consumer harmed by inadequate warnings can obtain relief turns solely on the happenstance of whether her pharmacist filled her prescription with a brand-name or generic drug.”

The second ruling (SORRELL, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF VERMONT, ET AL. v. IMS HEALTH INC ET AL.) deals with the constitutionality of a Vermont statute that prohibits a practice called “detailing.” Under this practice, pharmacies sell information about “prescriber (doctor) behavior,” collected when they process prescriptions, to data mining companies. The data mining companies in turn lease this information to drug companies so that they can better target their marketing messages to individual doctors.

The court voted 6-3 in favor of IMS Health and the other data miners, supporting their claim that the statute is unconstitutional. IMS argued that the data can be used to help monitor safety issues of new medications, to reduce costs, and to enable research such as studying research outcomes.

While I strongly support the concept that the innovative use of patient-related data (on an opt-in basis, by patients and doctors) can lead to huge benefits for patients, I think the opposite is true here. I agree with Justice Stephen Breyer who, in his dissenting opinion, said, “Shaping a detailing message based on an individual doctor’s prior prescription habits may help sell more of a particular manufacturer’s particular drugs. But it does so by diverting attention from scientific research about a drug’s safety and effectiveness, as well as its cost. This diversion comes at the expense of public health and the State’s fiscal interests.”

I am not qualified to comment on the constitutional validity of these decisions; nor do I think that they are in any sense monumental in the greater scheme of things. But when it comes to the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and the health challenges faced by individuals, these decisions are representative of the powerful forces in society that are wired to favor institutions over individuals.

If we are to repair our healthcare system, we must empower ordinary citizens, working in collaboration with the medical professionals who serve them, to seize control of their own health. This revolution can only be achieved through an equally powerful wave of radical innovations, such as those being explored in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab and catalyzed by a new generation of health-focused venture accelerators such as Rock Health.

In the end, our only hope for curing our critically ill healthcare system is innovation – definitely not legislation or litigation.

Last week I conducted a media tour for my new book in New York City. One thing really stood out for me.

I appeared on shows across the political spectrum, from Squawk Box on the right to NPR stations on the left, and just about everything in between.

In addition to talking about the wonders of creativity and invention at the MIT Media Lab (the theme of my book), I expressed my deeply held belief that meaningful innovation in America is in deep trouble. I believe that we as a people and a nation are in denial about this problem, continuing to believe that creativity and innovation are in the American DNA.

To my surprise, every one of the interviewers agreed strongly – often violently – with this point and each was anxious to dig in more deeply.

It was clear that I had hit a chord that resonated strongly across the political spectrum, at least as represented by the broadcast media. To the extent that the media reflect the sentiment of their constituents, then I just may have found an issue that unites many of the people of our country. This could be a first.

I’ve always felt that getting agreement on a problem is 90% of the solution. But in this case it is not so true, since the roots of the innovation crisis are very deep, both culturally and structurally. But this sure is a good start!

In many ways, it is a bit anticlimactic. No big parties or celebrations are planned. Today, I am traipsing around a steamy New York City doing media interviews, and tonight I will have a quiet celebration with my daughter Marissa and her husband Mike. My day will probably be not all that different from scores of other authors who are doing exactly the same thing.

It will take a few weeks until the dust settles on the media tour and I can begin the process of serious reflection on the process of birthing a book these days. But I don’t have to wait to know that it’s been a whole lot tougher than birthing start-up companies, which I have done more than a few times.

For me being an author has been much more difficult than being an entrepreneur. I have always loved books and had respect for authors, but as a result of my experience I now hold them in the highest regard. There are three main reasons:

(1) Writing a book is an endeavor that requires long stretches of deep concentration and focus. But in today’s world of constant connectivity and communication, it’s impossible to get more than ten minutes at a time alone with your thoughts. Entrepreneurs thrive in this frenetic 24×7, interrupt-driven environment of emails, tweets, Facebook posts and blogs; it’s poison for someone trying to construct a complex long narrative that makes any sense at all.

(2) It is authors who really have the odds stacked against them, not entrepreneurs. If it was tough to get a major publisher to take your book in the past, it is brutal now, especially if your manuscript is about anything other than sex, lies or murder. Getting a publisher to take your book makes getting a VC to invest in your start-up idea seem like a piece of cake.

(3) This was the biggest surprise for me. Once final copy-editing is finally done and your on-sale date is set, you soon learn from your publicist that the only way to get attention is if you constantly produce new and compelling content on blogs (your own and others), Twitter, and Facebook. If you don’t have a big “social media footprint” already, you better get one quickly and keep it growing. As an entrepreneur, once you get the product out there, a team of developers takes over producing new versions, freeing you up to find ways to grow the business. Not so for authors.

My conclusion: We should return to canonizing authors, and not just entrepreneurs as is the fashion today. In terms of inspiring and instigating the changes that are needed, the former have the toughest job, but ultimately the biggest impact.

During my time as director of the MIT Media Lab, I witnessed first-hand what radical innovation looks like, I describe it in my forthcoming book The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices. However, while writing the book, I came to believe that the type of curiosity- and passion-driven research that thrives at the MIT Media Lab today has all but disappeared elsewhere. The seeds of creative ideas and novel inventions that grow into meaningful innovations are no longer being planted at nearly the rate they were before.

By “meaningful innovations,” I mean those that improve our lives and improve society much more dramatically than the “digital affordances” that have proliferated in society today.

Sure, today we can shop for anything, connect with anyone and find just about any information, any time and anywhere, on our mobile devices. But for all these conveniences and connections, people feel less in control of their lives than ever before. I believe we need much more radical innovations that empower people with “digital agency,” enabling them to take control of their health, wealth and happiness in ways previously thought impossible.

In my view, Americans are still as adventurous and innovative as ever, but the system that supports them has become timid and risk-averse. The highly productive innovation ecosystem that thrived in the US in the late 20th century – a synergistic arrangement among academia, government and industry – is now broken. Given the prodigious challenges that face society today, this is a tragedy.

Until recently, I thought that I was alone in expressing these concerns. I found myself out of step with the current huge wave of excitement about social media and consumer web technologies and large investments in these technologies. But things are changing.

In his new book, The Great Stagnation, professor of economics Tyler Cowen explains that technological developments of recent times have made us happier, but done little to create new jobs. A recent article in The New York Times profiles entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who contends that the culture of innovation in the country has been on the decline since the 1960s. Thiel points to universities as lulling us into a false sense of security that results in a society that is simply coasting.

I applaud Cowen and Thiel on their courage to declare that the “Emperor has no clothes” and to offer their own solutions. As a society, we are collectively in a state of denial about the meaningful innovations that are essential if we are not only to survive, but also to thrive in the 21st century.

I intend to add my voice to this emerging dialogue and hope others will, too. In the weeks and months ahead, I will also offer possible solutions on this blog, using the valuable lessons I learned at the MIT Media Lab as a starting point.

Q. What do a child with autism, an Iraq war-veteran amputee and a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s have in common? (Other than having disabilities that begin with “A.”)

A. They are all the early adopters of radical new technologies that will make all our lives better in the future.

This was one of the most surprising things I learned at the MIT Media Lab. Let me explain.

For my entire career as an entrepreneur, I assumed that developing innovative technologies for people with disabilities, while the “right thing” to do, was not a particularly promising business proposition. Within a year of becoming director of the Media Lab, I learned that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The story began a few years before I arrived at the Lab, when researchers began to explore how to augment human cognitive and physical abilities. They even flirted with the idea of creating “super-humans” in an initiative they called “10X:Human Machine Symbiosis.”

By the time I joined the Lab, the researchers had focused their efforts on creating technologies aimed at those with physical or cognitive deficits.

Professor Rosalind Picard and her Affective Computing group were developing social/emotional face-readers for people with autism.

The PowerFoot Biom, which came out of work by the MIT Media Lab's Biomechatronics group. (Copyright iWalk 2011)

Professor Hugh Herr and his Biomechatronics group were designing robotic ankle prostheses for lower-leg amputees. Professor Tod Machover and his Opera of the Future group were experimenting with digital music interfaces for people with cognitive disabilities like Alzheimer’s disease.

I found all these efforts to be inspirational. But since I was responsible for raising funds for the Media Lab, I worried that its corporate sponsors wouldn’t fund this type of “socially relevant” research. When I mentioned my concern to Professor Seymour Papert (co-founder of the field of artificial intelligence and the world’s expert in how children use computers to learn), he said that I was looking at it all backwards.

“We are all disabled, just at different levels,” he explained.

For example, people with autism have difficulty reading the emotions of others, but so do most of us on occasion. Alzheimer’s patients struggle with memory problems, but who among us doesn’t? Amputees have trouble walking normally, but so do many elderly people.

Papert couldn’t see why technologies that help people considered to be “disabled,” both mentally and physically, wouldn’t also have a huge market—virtually everyone on the planet.

This brilliant man turned out to be right. It was not long until Roz Picard came to me with a list of more than two dozen Media Lab sponsors – in industries ranging from entertainment to consumer products to financial services to retail – who had seen her face-reading technology for people with autism and were interested in applying it in their businesses. At first, I was shocked. When Roz explained that these companies were looking to better understand the emotional reactions of their customers to their products, it started to make sense.

Andrew Marecki of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group performs a metabolic test of a 2011 version of the running exoskeleton. (Photo: Andy Ryan Photography)

Meanwhile, Hugh Herr and his students were applying what they had learned designing robotic prostheses for amputees to building ultra-lightweight “exoskeletons” that everyone could wear. The goal was to allow a person to run with the same level of metabolic expenditure as walking. This could really change the world of human mobility. Think about “exo-running lanes” on streets and highways, and new “exo-sports.”

And Tod Machover’s student Adam Boulanger was applying digital music interfaces he had developed for people with autism and Alzheimer’s to detect these disorders in their earliest stage in the general population. With alarming increases in the incidence of both of these diseases, early detection could benefit hundreds of millions of people.

I suppose this “disabled first, everyone afterward” approach to innovation shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me. After all, the keyboard on my smart phone is a descendant of the typewriter, invented by the Italian Pelligrino Turri in the early nineteenth century to enable the blind to write. And didn’t I learn in elementary school that Alexander Graham Bell’s inspiration for inventing the telephone was to be able to communicate with his hearing-impaired mother?

My sabbatical went in the opposite direction. I took a leave from my career in the “real world,” after 25 years as a technology entrepreneur, to experience the academic world. Of course, anyone familiar with the Media Lab knows that it is in no way a typical academic place, so my move was not really quite as radical as it may first appear.

Also, like an academic, I wrote a book during my sabbatical. The book is about the highly unorthodox research and researchers at the Lab, titled “The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform our Lives”.

My sabbatical now concluded, I have returned to my “comfort zone” as a high tech entrepreneur. This is a very exciting time to start high-tech companies, so my timing for re-entry is good.  But I came away from my sabbatical having learned a very important lesson.

Before I went to the Media Lab, I thought I knew a lot about innovation. After all, during college I had interned at NASA at the height of the Apollo moon project, started my career in the prestigious research labs of IBM, and from there went on to create a number of innovative high-tech startup companies.

But I was wrong, I had a lot to learn from the Media Lab about innovation.  Let me illustrate this by sharing one of the several dozen stories I told in my book.

CityCar Concepts. Photo by Will Lark

If you have visited the Media Lab in the last several years, you may have seen a curious, egg-shaped vehicle careening around the lobby.  That vehicle is a half-scale model of the CityCar, a networked, digitally controlled, stackable, foldable two-passenger electric vehicle that will make our urban areas much more livable, safe and sustainable.

Working on CityCar. Photo by Andy Ryan

Even more curiously, the CityCar was conceived and built by an eclectic group of researchers, practically none of whom had any formal training in automotive design.  The team included architects, computer scientists, a lawyer, a neuroscientist, a social scientist, visual artists, urban planners and many others of diverse backgrounds.  In classic MIT Media Lab fashion, they set aside from the outset any pre-conceived notions of what a “car” should be and instead posed the following question:

What if you imagined the kind of city in which you’d like to live, and then designed  a car for this ideal place?

This was the opposite of how cars had been designed for over a hundred years:  to fit into cities as they are, not as we wished they were.  The researchers went through  a decade-long process of idea creation – building, testing, re-building, re-testing, tinkering..  Along the way, they invented a new form of robotic wheel, a foldable RoboScooter, and a revolutionary, award-winning approach to managing urban transportation systems called. Mobility-on-Demand.

This was all possible because the MIT Media Lab is essentially an innovation on innovation. Thanks to a unique collaboration between the Media Lab and its industrial sponsors, its researchers enjoy a degree of creative freedom that has become exceptionally rare among research institutions.

At the Lab, not taking risks is the biggest risk of all. Crazy and wild-eyed ideas and inventions emerge from what appears to be chaos. Some of these seeds survive and grow into innovations that can improve our everyday lives, disrupt industries and  even transform society.

MIT MediaLab. Photo by Andy Ryan

A radical concept like the CityCar would have been difficult, if not impossible, to create and pursue anywhere but the MIT Media Lab. Simply put, I believe that the innovation ecosystem in the United States is tragically broken. The 60-year old arrangement between academia, government and industry that propelled  the waves of innovation in the second half of the 20th century no longer works.  We’ve lost our momentum.

Here’s my point. Just as the CityCar can serve as a starting point for designing the future of urban transportation, I believe that the Media Lab’s highly unorthodox research model, which made this and many other radical innovations possible, can serve as a starting point for designing the future of innovation—for innovating on innovation.

In the coming months, I will be writing about innovating on innovation in this blog. Among other things, I will talk about:

• Why the innovation ecosystem in the United States is broken
• The dire implications for our country and the world
• Why the next few years is actually the perfect (and perhaps last) window of opportunity to reverse course
• The Media Lab and other promising emerging models
• A game plan for innovating on innovation

I hope that you will stop by or subscribe to my blog, tell me what you are thinking, argue with me, and challenge me with your questions.  By working together, we can generate some powerful new ideas to innovate on innovation.

Time is short. Let’s get going.