On occasion I have been involved in discussions concerning medicine and technology with regard to what can be done for patients and what research is on the horizon. Without question I LOVE these discussions; they can be fun, engaging and animated. We use terms like; cutting edge, out of the box, paradigm shifting and groundbreaking. All these discussions require us to discuss the state of the art in science and medicine. State of the art is in reference to what technologies are being done now. When a new cutting edge technology is adopted by the medical community it is no longer cutting edge and becomes state of the art.

For me each of the buzz words mentioned above have specific meaning in my research as well as R&D. I tend to NOT use them capriciously but rather as specific scenarios within the developmental process. So I might talk about a cutting edge technology that is paradigm shifting. That would be a brand new technology destined to change the way we do business. An example would be the first CT scanners. That was new and novel technology and when adopted by the medical community changed the way we look at (in) patients with various diseases and injuries. So that community wide change is a paradigm shift.

In my opinion groundbreaking is used when multiple disciplines and discoveries must occur to achieve something. An enormous and classic example of true groundbreaking work is NASA’s work on the Apollo program to the Moon. While many had thought about going to the moon, it was thus not really out of the box, but it needed many discoveries and new development to get there. That makes the Apollo program groundbreaking.

To a large extent out of the box, as a buzz word-phrase, is overused and it may be difficult to pigeonhole precisely. But I typically consider out of the box thinking as a new way to think about a problem. A ridiculous example of out of the box thinking, using the Apollo program again, is instead of bringing a person to the Moon, bring the moon to a person. That would be out of the box thinking as well as catastrophic on many levels, like ocean tides and gravity etc. Images of George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life) lassoing the moon come to mind here.

Buzzwords in science, medicine and technology may seem on the surface to be useless jargon, but to some of us there are appropriate uses for these. So show your colleagues that not only can you use buzzwords but that you know when to use them.