Embrace This 4-Letter F Word

Medical device success stories are everywhere. But the savvy R&D experts recognize the importance of pulling the plug on a project that just isn't cutting it, and those are the stories that provide the best learning opportunities.  The ability to embrace failure became a recurring theme throughout the MD&M Minneapolis conference, and at least three speakers bit the bullet and shared stories of projects that, for one reason or another, fell short. Dale Larson, director of commercial initiatives at Cambridge, MA-based Draper Laboratory, was among the first to share a failure story Wednesday during a panel discussion of identifying and adapting technologies with crossover potential.  He talked about an internal R&D project that Draper had pursued involving bioresorbable electronics, a technology that initially seemed like it would have a lot of potential in healthcare. "We were working with some surgeons at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and we hit upon this thing called a surgical leave-behind sensor, something that the surgeon wanted to query post-operatively," Larson said. "And everybody got excited. The surgeons were foaming at the mouth, the engineers were like 'yes, it's going to go'. But then we asked, 'What are you going to measure?'" After drilling it down a bit, the team discovered that there wasn't really anything of great value that could be measured with what was, at the time, a very primitive set of electronics. "I killed the project because we cou...
Source: MDDI - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: MD & M Minneapolis R Source Type: news