At most hospitals, doctors and nurses create new equipment in order to provide their patients with improved medical care. This is also the case at the American hospital Massachusetts General Hospital, but here the hospital also has created a department where these ideas are gathered and potential producers are pursued if an innovation is thought to have commercial value.

Massachusetts General Hospital has developed an internal R&D lab, which incubates ideas from medical staff. They provide the clinicians with help to actualise the idea, and the lab creates contact to companies, who can produce and take the innovation to the market.

This is a source of new opportunities for companies: They can reduce their R&D cost by collaborating with lead users, and they can get access to radical innovations, which are based on a real market need. For example, Sigma Pumps has commercialised an intelligent drug infusion pump for anaesthesia, which was developed by one of the hospital’s physicians. The pump can dispense the proper dose of medicine to patients. Earlier pumps had been prone to drug-dosing calculation errors –sometimes leading to fatal results.

Sigma Pumps experienced an increase in annual sales from $8 million to $80 million, while another company that also commercialised the pump (Alaris) earned $700 million in sales from the pump.

Source: ReD Associates (2009) & von Hippel (2009)

For more details on this case, contact FORA at FORA@newnatureofinnovation.org.