Imagine It Forward: Courage, Creativity, and the Power of Change

by Beth Comstock

We were unfortunately all too familiar with what happened when we didn’t take customers’ needs into account. The engineers at GE Healthcare refused to design an MRI or CT scanner with a wider bore—the donut hole around which the amazing magnet with the force of up to 1.5 Tesla power spins. The marketplace trends were clear: people were getting bigger, with, um, wider girths. Some people found the experience of getting an MR image extremely uncomfortable. Or worse, they couldn’t fit at all. GE engineers refused to accept this; they believed that making the donut hole bigger would degrade the power of the magnets and thus create a less-than-perfect image. Why change if it doesn’t result in better image quality? they thought. So they refused to accept the market insights and focused instead on perfecting a scanning machine that was perfect only for engineers, and perhaps a few academic radiologists. And as a result, they lost market share as competitors came out with wider-bore MRIs, solving a big need for radiologists, imaging centers, and today’s patients.

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