High impact, high value medical innovation

A reader sent along a tip about an excellent presentation given at Harvard Medical School by Zen Chu, a venture capitalist and medical device entrepreneur. You can download the presentation from the Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology (CIMIT) blog. It's well worth having a look.Here are some tidbits I picked up from the document:

• Innovation without impact is worthless: Unmet clinical needs is a cliche, translational medicine must strive to become Standard of Care
• A very high share of med-tech innovations originate with physicians, and those inventions have a higher impact on average
• MDs look at value creation differently from investors, who attach more value to later stages of development than do the inventors. "Innovation is spark, development drives value."
• Incremental innovations are very useful, but creating a whole company based on one may doom the product
• "Time is Life" --and there are a variety of accelerants and deccelerants to be aware of

Some techniques to identify opportunities include:

• "Productize" a procedure: turn a service into a repeatable product, e.g., from stomach stapling to lap-band
• Remove treatment ambiguity to anticipate or create the standard of care
• Eliminate a provider or facility to reduce costs and provide an opportunity for profit
• Import solutions from other countries

The presentation ends with a call for a Commercialization Grand Rounds.I'm sorry I missed the live presentation, but glad to have at least had a look at the document.