Table 3.

Three key ideas to doing “Cutting edge research”.

S. No.	Idea	Explanation	Analogy	Example from Healthcare
1	Explore adjacent possible	The word ‘Adjacent Possible’ was coined by Dr Stuart Kauffman in his work on biological evolution. It represents all the elements outside but near the system. These elements represent opportunities for the system to form new connections and grow into.	All the friends of my friends (whom I don't know yet) are in the realm of adjacent possible. They are just one step away from becoming my friends too, should I take the initiative.	Diagnosing Pneumonia by listening to sound of cough using an Artificial intelligence (AI) based sound analytic app in a cell phone has been found to have high diagnostic accuracy.
2	Combine concepts	Combine concepts from across disciplines. Sometimes answers exist in other disciplines that we just have to borrow	There were over 1500 car manufacturers before Henry Ford. It was a small scale industry then and most manufacturers produced designer cars. Henry Ford combined car manufacturing expertise with production line technology (already in vogue in Beef industry) enabling Mass production of cars. The rest is history.	The above idea combines the principles of different sounds in different respiratory illnesses (auscultation) taught in medical school, to the idea of letting AI and mathematical algorithm analyse it better. By capturing it through a cell phone, it enables diagnosis over any distance.
3	Collaboration	There is a need to collaborate with experts of other domains once we have identified the entities that need to combine	The ubiquitous CT scan, with which we are all familiar with, represents a brilliant collaboration between Godfrey Hounsfield (Biomedical Engineer), Dr James Ambrose and Dr Louise Kreel (Radiologists) whose theoretical underpinnings were developed by the Physicist, Allan McLeod Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize with Hounsfield.	Clinicians and Software experts (with expertise in AI) need to collaborate to bring the above idea to fruition.