Intuitive's approach to research has evolved over the years as a venture-backed company.
Of course, small startup company is focused on its product, and getting that product to
the point that it's viable in the field.
Relatively soon after that phase, certainly within the first ten years of the company's
history, we started to be involved in small business research grants and actually received
funding to work collaboratively with external research groups.
That actually transitioned fairly quickly to a situation where our research has been
internally funded and where we now are actually a research driver by providing grant funding
to external groups.
Intuitive actually has some of its roots in the university research community.
Early concepts related to robot assistance really were first explored within that community.
That's also where some of the exciting research is occurring for future technologies today.
And so it's important for us to, as a company, learn from this community and also to give
back.
There's an opportunity for us to help create context, for us to help steer research in
a direction that is based on our learning from the field.
And so it's really helpful for us to remain actively engaged with that group to help support
its efforts and also to help provide that context and guidance towards compelling clinical
applications.
we engage and collaborate with academia in a number of different ways.
For example, we fund research grants that are focused on clinical research and technology
research as one mechanism.
We’ve also funded graduate fellowship programs.
These are usually master's or Ph.D.-level programs.
They're very collaborative, hands-on.
We're involved in jointly scoping projects, and involved in internships and exchanges
with students.
We also partner with groups in academia for sharing data, for mining data.
These are typically groups that have expertise in, for example, novel analytic approaches,
mathematical approaches for analyzing data.
Another thing that we do which has been quite interesting has been to donate and loan equipment
to university groups to support their research.
It turns out that da Vinci is a great platform for research because it's such a good way
of bringing technologies together for focusing technologies in the operating room.
And so if you can turn your partnered into a platform, then some very interesting and
surprising things can come out of that.
And so those are just some of the mechanisms that we've used to connect and remain connected
with the university research community, with academia in order to support and to leverage
some of the outputs from that community.
There are several things that we again from these relationships.
Of course, there's the influx of ideas, things that we wouldn't ordinarily think of in sort
of the focused product development space that we have.
So new ideas are certainly an area that we benefit greatly from the community.
Of course, the opportunity to engage with students and to help them to understand the
challenges that we have in our field is important.
It helps them to focus their research efforts and it also helps them to understand what
a career might look like in our field and with Intuitive.
So it's a great recruiting tool both for recruiting faculty to work on problems that we care about,
but also for recruiting students and post docs and folks to come and join the team.