concept screening is where the rubber meets the road in terms of really picking an idea
that’s going to go forward. After leaving Stage 3, innovators and teams
oftentimes have a few concepts, maybe 10, 20, that have basically met the criteria that
solve the needs specification's must haves and need statement. Now, the next question
is how do you now take that to really generate one or two leading concepts.
Here’s where intellectual property, reimbursement, regulatory business models come into play.
The secret here is to work from the bottom of the list, to try to eliminate those ideas
that don’t meet those filters. For concept screening, I think our first filter
was just a gut feeling, on is this a promising idea? Have I heard of something like this
before? But then the next stage was a lot of literature, deep diving, is there much
information out there on this? Could we develop something?
It’s a difficult balance, figuring out how much research you want to do on each concept.
Some people will want to cut concepts quicker and other people will want to dig in deeper
and I think trying to find the right medium for your team where you give some of those
concepts that are a little bit further out there their fair shake, but then also don’t
dig too deep on concepts that really aren’t feasible.
We started filtering based on trying to find the one big risk for each concept.
As an example, we had a better urinary catheter, to prevent catheter-associated UTIs. We felt
we had a compelling idea technically, but the business model of commodity products,
which is what our concept would be, didn’t make sense.
I'd say reimbursement is probably the most challenging to find the information you want,
but didn't keep us up at night as much as IP did because IP, it seems like you can never
really do an exhaustive job of researching everything and being completely sure that
you're in the clear. One important thing to know is that one person’s
killer risk is another person’s challenging opportunity. So it goes back to your strategic
focus. Are you willing to take on a big regulatory risk? Some teams will be. For some other teams
where time and money is a big issue, a long regulatory pathway is a killer risk. You need
to know that fast before you’ve spent time and money taking that idea further.
When we finally got down to 4, that’s when we started prototyping.
It's fun to just go in and build things in the prototyping lab, but it's a lot more productive
when you have something you need to figure out and then you build the types of prototypes
that will help you answer those questions. <<What are the usability issues with this
thing? We need to keep this in place, so we might need a velcro sort-of thing>>
I wouldn’t get too concerned about how rudimentary the prototype is, because you can learn a
lot from really, really simple prototypes. You don’t need much of a budget to learn
some very basic things about your concept. You don’t have to have built robots as a
kid to prototype. You need to just make something, sketch something, or do it with paper and
scissors and staples. And the thing is once you start making things and handling them,
it loosens up your head. You’re able to understand whether your idea is going to work
or not in a way that you just can’t get by talking about it.
Screening ideas. It's definitively a growing process, because every idea becomes your baby,
and every idea becomes the idea you want. Using all the research you've done to these
to really figure out what are the requirements and criteria to objectively compare concepts
and let the process play out so that whichever one scores the highest, using tools such as
developing a Pugh concept matrix, et cetera. Those should be the ones which should be taken
forward. There’s a natural tension there, but I think
that that’s valuable because then you’re forced to defend why you like something.
So when you have that final concept and you’re gonna do this for real, you’re going to
go out and raise money and launch it, I guess the one piece of advice I have is trust the
process. If you’ve gone through these steps, you have a good concept, guaranteed. Take
it forward. You may need to tweak it as you go, but it has all of the right characteristics
to be a successful medical technology.