Where Do Dentists Go to Find Opportunity?
I have spent many years around dental education, courses, congresses, clinicians, companies and new ideas. And there is something I find increasingly strange.
We have events for almost everything in dentistry. Implantology, periodontology, aesthetics, digital dentistry, orthodontics, practice management, new technologies. We have enormous exhibitions where you can walk for hours discovering products you did not know existed. We have brilliant speakers presenting what they believe will change clinical practice.
But where do you go to discoveropportunities?
I don’t mean what is new. We already have plenty of places for that. I mean what is genuinely worth your attention, your time and, eventually, your money.
This is becoming an important distinction because almost everything new is somehow communicated as an opportunity. A new technology can make you more efficient. A new clinical concept can differentiate you. AI can transform your workflow. A new service can create another revenue stream. A course can change the way you practice. A network can open doors. A new business model can change the economics of your clinic.
Some of these things really can. But many don’t.
And the strange part is that we rarely know which is which before investing in them.
Usually, the dentist has to do all the work. You hear about something, become curious, start researching it, listen to the people promoting it, try to understand the evidence, calculate the investment and imagine how it might fit into your practice. Then you buy it, learn it, implement it and wait to discover whether the opportunity was actually there.
Sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes, a year later, the only measurable result is another hole in the practice budget.
I think we need to become much more serious about what we call an opportunity.
Being innovative is not enough. Being new is certainly not enough. Even having good science behind something does not automatically make it a good opportunity for a particular dentist.
A real opportunity has context.
It should solve something that matters. It should have a reasonable path to implementation. It should make sense clinically, financially or strategically. We should understand how difficult it is to introduce, how much time it requires, whether patients will actually value it and whether the promised advantage can survive after everybody else discovers the same thing.
And there is another question we almost never ask: what else could I have done with the same money, time and attention?
That may be one of the most important questions of all.
A €30,000 technology is not necessarily a bad investment because it fails. It may be a bad investment because another €30,000 investment could have created far more value. Opportunity is not only about what you gain. It is also about what you give up in order to pursue it.
This is why I think dentistry is missing something.
Our events are generally organized around subjects. We put implantology with implantology, aesthetics with aesthetics, digital dentistry with digital dentistry and business with business. It makes perfect sense educationally.
But opportunity doesn’t behave like that.
The most valuable thing you discover next year might be a technology. Or it might be a business model. It might be a person you should know, an idea from outside dentistry, a new way of positioning yourself, a different type of partnership or something nobody has even decided how to categorize yet.
And there is currently no obvious place to explore all of these things together.
Perhaps that is the real gap.
We have become very good at creating places where dentists can discover what is new and learn what is already known. We have not become equally good at creating places where they can investigate what may actually be worth pursuing next.
That will become increasingly important. Dentistry is moving too quickly for anyone to follow everything, and the number of possible investments in knowledge, technology and business is becoming almost impossible to process.
At some point, knowing more is no longer the advantage.
Knowing what deserves your attention becomes the advantage.
I believe the dental industry will eventually need a much better way of identifying and evaluating opportunity. Not only products and technologies, but business models, people, ideas, networks and new forms of professional distinction. And the criteria will have to become much more sophisticated than “new,” “innovative” or “game-changing.”
Maybe we also need a place where all of this can be explored without pretending that every new thing is automatically the next big thing.
Because there is an enormous space between what dentistry already knows and what dentistry has not yet learned to recognize.
And somewhere inside that space are probably some of the best opportunities our profession has not discovered yet.
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