As a kid in Argentina, Jose Navia recalls, he liked finding ways to fix broken things around the house. He also was exposed to the world of medicine. His mother was a midwife. His uncle was a cardiac surgeon.

Given his background, it’s not surprising that Navia grew up to be not only a heart surgeon but also an inventor. He has 35 patents to his name and Cleveland Clinic has spun off two companies from his patents. “Innovation is part of my life,” he says. “I couldn’t see myself just doing surgery.”

Navia, 63, is an internationally known surgeon and chairman of cardiothoracic surgery at Cleveland Clinic Florida. He is vice chair of the Cleveland Clinic Florida Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute, which encompasses 76 providers on the original Florida campus in Weston, where he’s director of the Weston Heart and Vascular Center, and Cleveland Clinic’s hospitals on the Treasure Coast. The Institute through November handled 3,036 surgical cases. “We do a lot of valves,” he says.

Navia speaks Spanish, English and Italian. He earned his medical degree at the National University of La Plata in Buenos Aries. At the Italian Hospital in Buenos Aires, he invented a new way to use a catheter to repair a hole in the heart of a patient. He had it patented in Argentina, not realizing innovation needed global protection.

At Cleveland Clinic, he found complex cases to work on and an environment that supported innovation and knew what to do with it. He says a plus for him is that he can draw and sketch out his ideas. He says he aims always to find a way to improve things for patients — “how can we fix things in a really easy way. Make the complex simple. And in an elegant way. It is extremely gratifying to invent a new way to help a patient who otherwise may not have been able to have a good outcome.”

His long research and innovation list includes transcatheter valve repair and replacement devices. He says ideas for innovation sometimes come when he’s in a relaxed state, thinking about a particular patient’s issue. “Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and go to write quickly what I thought,” he says. “It’s so powerful sometimes. You can’t stop thinking and drawing and writing the idea.”