The thing about a pilot study is you don't get paid. Pilot studies come in all sorts of guises and forms.
Maybe it's an initial episode of a TV series to see whether people like it, maybe it's a research paper early on before you go into the bigger project, maybe it's research and development or a focus group.
The perk about these things is that there's an investment without a guarantee of return, and so you have to be brave, and you have to be bold, and you have to be creative.
When I was younger back in 2006, Treatment guide one by the ITI was launched teaching people how to provide extraordinary provisional crowns on single implants in the front of the mouth.
Nobody knew how to do that really then, except for the guys in Bern.
And so, I picked it up quick.
I started to do it in my implant practise, and I photographed 5 or 6 provisional crowns.
But I never charged anyone for them because I wasn't sure whether it would work, and I didn't want to get into bother with people who were paying for something that wasn't great.
I explained to the patient that I was doing something new to try and get a better result.
And in all 5 cases, I smashed it.
Collected the photographs and then presented it as a concept at an ADI study club meeting in Nottingham against a fellow professional that worked in our area who was trying to present a different method of doing this which simply didn't work.
It was a pivotal moment in being accepted as somebody who understood what they were doing in implant dentistry. I would go on to present cases like that for years afterwards, being paid really quite well after the pilot study had been successful.
I still present some of those cases now 20 years later.
I've had plenty of pilot studies that didn't work, when I've tried something, and it wasn't effective and effectively I've lost the money for it.
As a business, (and even if you're a dental associate, you're a business).
Research and development is part of your budget.
It's part of the ‘wastage’ principle of business.
Some you win some you lose.
And you win more than you lose if you're good at it, and if you're not good at it, you do something else.
Blog Post Number - 4233
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