Design for value...moving the goalpost

The last decade saw transformation across consumer electronics, hi-tech, automotive trickle slowly into medical industry....but as the industries consolidate, medical OEM’s need to realign, fast…

The accelerating pace of change means that most medical R&D leaders can no longer afford design philosophy institutionalized over the years. The design for cost philosophy is not a recipe of success that can be reliably banked on.

End customers are changing constantly and medical device companies need to constantly innovate to stay relevant in business. The shift from product based to service oriented model of business implies that medical OEM’s need to understand the customer hierarchy and their needs across the vale chain of their service – physicians, providers, patients, lab technicians, provider procurement teams etc.

Commercial, Marketing, Manufacturing and R&D teams therefore all need to work together to build a product that delivers value to all their customers – and this implies a value based design philosophy, that can be a disruptive force shaping up the industry. The challenge is that unlike auto or consumer electronics industry making a concrete sense of hierarchy based user requirements and solutions is slightly more complex in the medical industry.

Successful service providers of the future in the medical industry will be the ones that contribute to the design philosophy at least partly help in building the design language catering to all the end users – the alignment cannot and today thankfully, is not always measured in operations cost reduction. Today we are seeing larger share of fast and iterative product launches in medical – service providers need to be nimble & capable enough to scale horizontally and vertically across customer’s product teams and deliver tangible value. The inherent need to define it and establish a measure of success is important not only in building the right product but a right customer-service provider relationship as well. 

Design for value and deliver value will truly be the theme of the future across the medical enterprise.