Medical Device Link.

DESIGN

Previous articles in this series have talked about the importance of creating “market-pull” for “technology-push” products; these are products that are brought to market by technology and science-based companies without any existing market demand. However, many products are born of technological advances or from technologies coming together to create better performance. It is interesting to examine how leading companies manage their technology development programmes effectively so that they can

• launch technology products that meet market needs at a predictable frequency
• reduce the gap between marketing and technology development
• prioritise strategic technology projects
• decide when to go outside and when to develop technology internally.

Boston Scientific (www.bostonscientific.com) produces medical devices for minimally invasive surgical procedures, diagnoses and therapies based on acquired and internally developed technology. The company is traditionally organised into manufacturing/distribution, research and development (R&D)/engineering, and marketing/sales units (without a service division). Each of these groups has a distinct understanding of “technology.” For marketing, technology is what the market wants; for manufacturing, it is the process of how the product will be made; for R&D, it is the design. Boston Scientific has a four-stage process, which is simple to replicate even for smaller companies and helps it to drive consistent continuous success in the market.

Technology “buckets”

The company balances its investments across four technology “buckets:”

• Continuous innovation that is often described as “sustaining technologies,” which provide current revenue.
• Core technologies that the company is already employing, which can be leveraged across multiple products; core technology projects often take advantage of external collaborations to improve internal development efforts.
• Exploratory products that employ known technologies (rather than those being invented), which are prototyped in potential products to reach or create brand-new markets or customers for the company.
• Disruptive technologies that focus solely on technology rather than products or markets; they are high-risk technologies that are new to the world and/or the medical device industry.

These four buckets are organised in terms of relative closeness to the customer, with continuous innovation being the closest and disruptive technologies the farthest removed from current customers or markets. The company has six different technology groups, and these groups are expected to balance across these four buckets with at least some investment of resource and time beyond incremental improvement. The target ratios between these buckets vary by business.

Market drivers maps

The company prepares a “Market Drivers Map,” which depicts the trends, events, competition, new technologies, unmet opportunities and regulatory developments that could have an impact on the market. This market appraisal helps to balance the fact that technology roadmapping does not take account of return on investment. This market-drivers assessment begins by looking at areas with desirable market size and growth and knowledge of present and anticipated competitors’ capabilities, and estimates of the investment required to reach the targeted strategy. The company does not usually seek to enter a market unless it can expect to be among the top two companies.

At this stage, it is critical to convey market needs to everyone in the development process. If this communication is based in “techno-speak” rather than “market speak,” the company can easily fall into the trap of designing products at this point rather than concentrating on market needs.

Product features maps

The next stage is to translate the market drivers into product features by creating a product features map. This map looks at the product features, attributes and performance levels that are predicted to satisfy customers over time. R&D and marketing jointly define product features. Again, communication is important here because these two groups can speak two different languages. Focussing this communication on the customer helps to maintain clear, common priorities.

Technology project mapping

Technology project mapping looks at the technology, design, materials, processes and analytical components that need to be in place to deliver the desired features on time. Boston Scientific ranks the technology portfolio using a scoring methodology. The scoring approach should be kept simple, because the numbers are a means of provoking discussion rather than finding final answers to portfolio questions. When this system was first applied, the company immediately thinned its technology project pipeline by two-thirds.

Boston Scientific initially used seven parameters to rank each technology project idea and to create a total score for each technology project; this has now been reduced to four:

• Level of urgency (this has been discarded because all projects were deemed urgent).
• “Leveragability” of the technology across products.
• Business unit funding strategy
(this has been replaced with “market size in 2010”).
• Innovation level (this is now divided into the four technology buckets).
• Ability of the technology to meet the customers’ needs.
• Magnitude of the technology’s impact on drivers (now a score-based assessment).
• The risk to reach proof of concept; a technical risk that the product or the technology will fail to perform or meet expectations.

The product portfolio

The last stage in this process is to bring the information from the technology buckets, market drivers, product features and technology project map together into a fixed product portfolio. This portfolio is reviewed only twice a year. It is “defended” four times a year from challenges by marketing and finance, and from project teams from other business units on the technology side.

Boston’s four-stage process has led to the launch of products that meet market needs at a predictable frequency, and it is a process that has proven successful in small and large businesses.

Jane Hogan is Executive Director of Pure Insight,* a European member-only service and conference provider for product development teams, Cuthbert House, City Road, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 2ET, UK, tel. +44 191 350 6171, e-mail: jane.hogan@pure-insight.com, www.pure-insight.com.

* formerly Knowledge Roundtable Europe