Why Is It So Hard to Innovate at Big Medical Device Companies? (MDDI Online)
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Large medical device companies boast big R&D budgets and world-class engineers. So why does most of the innovation in medtech come from startups?
How do you develop a groundbreaking medical device? If you work at a small company, the answer is put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears (not to mention some of your own cash and probably a lot of sleepless nights). But if you work at a big medtech company, innovation is just an acquisition away.
That’s probably an oversimplification, but you get my point. Innovation in medtech these days typically starts from the ground up. The dirty work, in many cases, is done by a scrappy startup with a novel idea and the guts to chase it. As soon as the concept starts to show promise, one of the big guys swoops in to gobble it up, commercialize the technology, and reap the rewards.
What I don’t understand is this: If small companies working with a skeleton crew and a shoestring budget can churn out disruptive innovations on the regular, why can’t the biggest medtech companies, with their billion-dollar R&...
