Dr. Mark Reiley, best known as the creative engine behind Kyphon (bought by Medtronic), Archus (bought by Globus), Reiley Orthopedics, (triangular fusion rods for hands and feet—bought by Wright Medical), IN-BONE Total Ankle, (also Wright Medical), SI-BONE triangular fusion rods for the Sacra-Iliac Joint (IPO October 2018) and Reiley Pharmaceuticals (agent to exactly locate the source of pain using beta-camera), is also an artist who has produced—we kid you not—more than 400 gallery-quality works of art.
In fact, during that period in his life when Reiley was writing several hundred patents and founding or co-founding nine medical device companies, he was churning out incredible paintings. At his moment of greatest device and corporate productivity, his artistic output literally doubled.
The life of Reiley is a creation story.
The Etiology of Art and Creation
The root word in ‘creativity’ is “create.” As in the “act of creation.” It’s hard work. Really good artists and engineers can look at the world in new ways, find hidden patterns and connect seemingly unrelated spatial phenomena in order to create something.
Their processes are profound, subjective and complex because they are derived from personal perceptions, emotions, memories and both formal and informal education. In Reiley’s case, what emerged made hundreds of thousands of patients lives better but also, through his glorious art, thrilled and inspired.
One of the jokes about former President Bill Clinton, is that as a child in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he was so smart that his friends used to come over to his house just to watch him think.
The joke is that thinking is invisible. It becomes visible, in reality, when an artist or engineer engages in the reductive act of converting ideas into things.
In reverse, when we look at art, or read a book or hold in our hands an innovative implant, we receive a bit of the creator’s gestalt and can, sometimes, experience a new way of thinking, seeing or empathizing.
Engineers and artists, despite possessing different aims, use reductive processes to turn vague, perhaps disorganized complex thinking and feeling into specific works of art or inventions.
Another way of saying this is: artists use a particular language, medical device inventors use a different language, but their creative processes are related.
Mark Reiley finds both refuge and inspiration in the language of form, line, color and light—which, in turn, informs his other language. Mark’s inner world flows through his hands, his brushes, pens and CAD/CAM to create…things that rise to “art” in its broadest and most profound sense.
Jeff Dunn has been CEO of three companies that were based on Mark Reiley inventions, most recently SI-BONE. Jeff is Mark’s longest and arguably most successful business partner. “I think Mark is about as out of the box, as unfollowing as any person I’ve ever met on earth,” said Dunn to OTW. “He really doesn’t care what other people think, he is a pioneer in the truest sense of that word.”
“His brain is packed with processing power. Ninety eight percent of his focus is trying to figure out new things, spatially. Mark is a spatial thinker. In the device world, one size doesn’t fit all. God made everyone’s body parts differently. People need different solutions. To invent an implant, you have to think spatially and functionally.”
“There’s very few people who make that link like Mark Reiley does. That is what makes Mark special.”
