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Associate Professor and Vice-Chair for Research, Department of Surgery, Baylor College of Medicine, USA

Qualities of an innovative thinker? If I had to pick two, it would be creativity and fearlessness. Innovators have to be creative and think about clever solutions to problems in novel and disruptive ways – that is a given. But the most successful innovators and inventors that I know were also incredibly bold and fearless. They knew people would likely doubt them and criticize them for their creative ideas, and regardless of these challenges they believed in their invention and pushed forward with confidence until others started to realize the potential and novelty of what they had created.