I’ve been thinking about Taylor Swift – not for the usual reasons, but in the context of medical innovation. A recent interview on the Cures and Capital Podcast compared developing new medicines to trying to beat The Beatles in a world where their music is available to everyone, for free, forever. The point being that such a scenario makes it incredibly difficult to improve upon what already exists.

From a creativity and innovation perspective, the answer to this challenge would be to create something entirely new – something different, disruptive, and unexpected. In music terms, that’s Taylor Swift. Instead of trying to remix The Beatles endlessly, we establish a whole new market.

This idea led me to reflect on healthcare, innovation, and how we approach medical advancements. The core dilemma is that if we introduce something revolutionary, our own ‘Taylor Swift’, it’s incredibly high-risk. And even if we succeed, we then face the challenge of competing against our own innovation in the future.

This is undeniably true.

Drug discovery is inherently risky. It’s far easier to create a slight variation of an existing treatment, a Beatles remix, than to build something brand new from scratch. And once we do develop a new medicine, it eventually becomes generic, available at little to no cost, making it difficult to sustain innovation long-term.

The result?

We lean towards incremental improvements. We tweak existing treatments to make them slightly better, slightly more convenient, rather than taking the leap into the unknown. Regulators, too, are more comfortable with familiar frameworks—things they can measure, assess, and approve with confidence. We keep improving what exists instead of starting from scratch.

But that’s still a remix strategy. And in the end, we’re just giving people different versions of The Beatles.

In a world dominated by Beatles-style medicine, how do we create Taylor Swifts? We need to take bold risks, think differently, and challenge the conventional wisdom of what healthcare should look like. What if the issues patients face aren’t fully captured by traditional regulatory frameworks? What if we need to re-educate, rethink, and redefine how we measure success? It’s daunting, change always is, but for an industry that prides itself on innovation, we are surprisingly conservative.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do believe in bold revolutions. We should be striving to create Taylor Swifts and then be prepared to solve the Taylor Swift problems that follow. So, what are the big, bold ideas that will take us there? If Taylor Swift feels like too much of a leap, I’d settle for just some thoughts.