Too often when people think about innovation they think about things or widgets or apps or technology. Yet in the end, innovation is nothing without people. More specifically, most major innovations require people to change their behavior in some way large or small.

This truism became crystal clear to me during my time spent trying to transform Lafayette, LA into a Living Lab for Healthcare Innovation, or a place where the next generation of the Internet could be tested in real-world healthcare environments.

Time and time again we ran into issues not with technology but with the challenges associated with getting individuals and organizations to operate differently.

Case in point, one of our major initiatives was setting up telemedicine clinics. The first was for employees at the US’s largest jewelry manufacturer. The second was for elementary students at a school.

Both use cases grew out of a similar need , namely to improve access to urgent care services. For the jewelry manufacturer it was an issue of saving employees time going through security, driving to the doctor’s office, waiting at the doctor’s office, driving back, and then going through security again. For the schools it was about keeping kids at school and especially about improving access to care by low-income children.

The gist of how the system worked was to have an on-site nurse connected to an off-site doctor through videoconferencing with a digital stethoscope and otoscope. With this setup we were able to deliver up to 70% of the services of an in-person urgent care clinic.

What was interesting, though, was that while the technology was essentially plug-and-play, it was the people part of the equation that forced each project to take upwards of a year to go live.

For the employer it was a matter of figuring out what services could be delivered, what the legal agreement looked like between the healthcare provider and the manufacturer, how payments were going to be delivered (which ended up being an adventure despite them being self-insured), where the telemedicine clinic was going to be setup on their campus, and how they were going to educate their employees about these services.

For the school it was a matter of figuring out how to staff it with a full-time nurse when the standard was for a nurse to split her time between two schools, determining how the service was going to pay for itself when Medicaid didn’t yet reimburse for telemedicine visits, getting parents to fill out the necessary paperwork and educating them about the benefits of this system, and so on.

In the end both projects successfully launched thanks to the hard work of a diverse team of champions and stakeholders, but despite the clear value these telemedicine clinics could deliver it was still a real lesson in understanding how just because an innovation promises to make the world a better place doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to implement it.

Instead what I learned was that establishing the social infrastructure of deploying a new innovation can be just as if not more important and difficult than setting up the technical or physical infrastructure.

It took me a while, but I think I finally figured out why that is. While an innovation may hold the potential of making life better, if it’s truly something new then there can be no guarantees of its impact other than the work it will take to disrupt the status quo and give it a try. In other words, the only certainty is that there will be more work to do in exchange for the possibility that the innovation will actually achieve the progress it’s aiming for.

It’s because of these lessons learned that I now look at innovations with a new lens that’s based not just on if something has potential in the abstract but instead with a clearer understanding of what it’s going to take to actually get people to adopt new behaviors and how that affects the odds of success, the resources needed to achieve success, and the resultant ROI from this expanded analysis.

If you’re someone who feels compelled to try and make the world a better place through innovation, my advice is to you is to never underestimate the challenges associated with establishing the social infrastructure necessary to sustainably support what you’re doing.

This isn’t to say that anyone should shy away from pursuing huge paradigm-shifting innovations, but rather that it will behoove you to go in with eyes wide open so you can properly calibrate expectations, budgets, and timelines to achieve the success that you’re seeking.

Unknowingly, Charlton Heston had it right years ago, assuming you swap in “innovation” for “soylent green” in this iconic scene: