- Novel ideas produce a wide range of reactions
- This tends to make investors nervous
Some ideas are unambiguously good, but still take years to catch on. Take hand-washing in medical settings, for example. In the 1800s, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis introduced a policy of hand sanitisation for doctors on his watch. Patient mortality decreased by unprecedented levels, and he is hailed today as the “father of infection control”. Yet in his lifetime, the findings were ignored: doctors continued to believe in bad air and divine will and treated infection with blood-letting.