After a recent client engagement, I was standing in line at the Houston airport waiting to board my flight back to Phoenix. As I waited for the incoming flight to deplane, I was pleasantly surprised to see Kevin Everett walk off the flight as the first passenger off the plane. Some of you may recall the name Kevin Everett. Kevin is the Buffalo Bills tight end that was severely injured in a game earlier this season. During a freak play, Kevin collided with a player from the other team and severely injured his neck leaving him motionless on the field. As the medical staff attended to him, and eventually removed him from the field via ambulance, many thought he would never walk again.

In the days and weeks after the accident, many details started to surface about Kevin's injury and prognosis for recovery. The early outlook was that Kevin would live, but wouldn't walk again. Days later, Kevin surprised everyone by moving his feet. A few short weeks after, he walked. Many attribute this miracle recovery to the innovative and nearly radical treatment he received from his physician, Dr. Andrew Cappuccino, in the hours after the accident. Tim Layden from Sports Illustrated detailed Dr. Cappuccino's treatment of Kevin Everett as follows:

Dr. Cappuccino introduced mild hypothermia as a part of Everett's care. In November 2006, Cappuccino had attended a seminar of the Cervical Spine Research Society and sat in on a talk by Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. Dietrich devoted the last 10 minutes of his presentation to the potential benefits of induced hypothermia for neuroprotection -- the rapid cooling of the body to reduce metabolic demand and to prevent further damage from swelling and other inflammatory mechanisms. It is a controversial treatment that has not been established as a standard of care in spinal cord injuries and is the subject of considerable debate in the field. Partly motivated by that talk, Cappuccino had instructed the EMTs at Bills games to stock their ambulance with three bags of saline solution in a cooler.

"When we got into the ambulance, Dr. Cappuccino told me to start two IV lines with the iced saline," says Bartel. Cappuccino also pushed 3.5 grams of the steroid Solu-Medrol intravenously, and from the ambulance he instructed the hospital to prepare a solution that would deliver 600 milligrams of the steroid per hour for the next 23 hours. This is a more common treatment in spinal cord injuries, although it has not proved universally effective.

In my role as a Principal Consultant for Knowledge Infusion, I meet with clients everyday that have been doing the same things for years and have followed a very prescribed path. Conversely, I'm also fortunate to have worked with clients that are on the cutting edge trying new things and introducing new technologies to the workforce. Through the use of collaborative technologies, these clients have been successful at connecting with the workforce and changing the game.

As the story of Kevin Everett shows us, innovation requires taking a leap and trying something that hasn't been done before. Had it not been for the innovative thinking of Dr. Cappuccino, I may not have watched Kevin Everett walk off that flight in Houston. Had Dr. Cappuccino not taken a leap and tried something innovative, Kevin Everett may still be lying in a hospital bed.