Your innovative medtech or medical device idea may solve a problem that you face on a regular basis, but that doesn’t always make it a good candidate for commercialization.
It’s not just your idea that matters, but also others’ need for your idea because you’re not the only person that’s going to be using your product. Having a great idea means nothing if people aren’t interested in using it. This is where the voice of the customer comes into play for medtech innovators. A large part of the innovation and development process is marrying your idea with what potential clinical users want.
Asking your associates, clinicians in the O.R.s, nursing staff, and patients can help you get a better sense of what other people are interested in and their opinion of your potential product. This is considered to be one of the first steps in the discovery and development processes.
There is a difference between a clinical need and your need. Physicians can sometimes overlook the possibility that they are one of the only people having a certain problem. So this idea may successfully solve the problem, but the problem isn’t always all-inclusive. There should be a good amount of time spent on deciding – with complete clarity – what you and your colleagues are seeing as an unmet gap, need or problem. Then you can start thinking about the various solutions to this problem and evaluating their validity and addressable market.
Does your innovative medtech idea address an unmet clinical need? Dr. Emily Blum, Kelley Bennett, Sarah Cohen and Dersi Patel try to help innovators get to the right answer in the video below.
Stay tuned for the next videos in this series as they continue to discuss the process that physicians must go through when developing a new medical device, and the team that it takes to do it.
If you are a potential physician innovator with an idea for a new medical device and want to learn more about what it takes to bring that idea to life, visit our website, email us at info@devices.net or fill this form.