It’s perhaps the most commonly heard value proposition in the contract engineering market space…we’re faster than our competition. What isn’t necessarily offered up is faster at what? There’s a place for fast, but not at the expense of fastidiousness. Speed of engineering alone is not enough. The driving goal in today’s highly dynamic marketplace should be speed to cash flow, and that involves a lot more than just engineering.
Time bites into medical device companies in two significant ways. First, the regulated market in which we operate demands verification, validation and meticulous documentation throughout the product life cycle – we’re all dealt a built-in time delay that slows the commercialization process. Second, the rest of the world, and in particular the technology world, isn’t waiting around for us to catch up. In the time that it takes for us to navigate design, development and regulatory, the ground (meaning our anticipated target market and the reimbursement landscape) may have shifted beneath us. Windows of opportunity open and close at breathtaking speed in today’s world…even in medical device.
The fact of the matter is, a myriad of mission-critical activities and disciplines must be executed in a highly coordinated manner in order to achieve speed to cash flow. The orchestration of patient-centric design, design risk assessments, documentation, compliance, V&V, clinical study design, healthcare economics, and reimbursement strategies must all move in concert to achieve real speed to market traction. A single misstep or oversight early in the process can set a new device on unanticipated, and unwelcomed, trajectories.
Strategic Development and Innovation (D&I) takes the entire developmental and commercialization ecosystem into account at the very outset of the new product development life cycle. By embedding formal, strategic planning within the development process, significant operational and market risk is scrubbed away well before submission to FDA. Anticipated bottlenecks are identified, enabling resourcing to be deployed to work in parallel, rather than incurring resource dormancy that results from having to work in sequence.
By taking a truly holistic approach, Strategic D&I has demonstrated its ability to move new devices into the market twice as fast as traditional approaches to R&D. In financial terms, this pulls outlying revenues from future years closer to the present. Modeling from real-world projects demonstrates this approach can increase cumulative revenue, within the first five years of commercialization, by a factor of more than 225%. This has a significant impact on company valuation growth as well.
This approach is supported by an independent, 2016 study released by Deloitte*. In the study, Deloitte discovered that market leading product development teams integrate value-adding strategies early in the design and development process. This approach improves early decision-making, improving both engineering efficiencies and product efficacy at launch.
Over the past ten years, REV1 has developed 137 devices for 67 medical device companies, contributing more than $1 billion in client company valuation growth. To learn more about how REV1 Engineering can contribute to your strategic success, please contact Terry Murray at terry@rev1engineering.com or call (951) 696-3933.