| Mapping the future at Medrad means tracking product hype as well as product type. |
|
|
|
There are two kinds of roadmaps at Medrad: ones that face in, and ones that face out. Feature article from our archives... Medrad, the U.S. affiliate of the international medical giant Schering AG, uses roadmapping both to scan the external environment and to plan for its own future. In a recent interview, Don DeLauder, Medrad's Director of Product Innovation and Advanced Development, described how the two types of maps are used to strategically position the company in its niche of medical imaging technologies.
By Peter Longini, Managing Editor If you’re among the privileged few to glimpse at one of Medrad’s handful of technology roadmaps –graphic timelines reflecting the medical device company’s assessment of where outside developments affecting its product lines are likely to go – you’re apt to see some strange spikes in the trajectories of several highly-ballyhooed new technologies. Rendered as sweeping curves, the lines which plot the public visibility, analyst expectations, and industry optimism associated with new technologies climb sharply up out of nowhere and peak at lofty heights that coincide with the pinnacle of buzz surrounding them in the stock market, trade press, and popular media. Then, just as steeply, they tumble down into what is variously identified as the “trough of disillusionment” or “trough of despair.” That exhilarating climb and sickening descent are part of a phenomenon that the Gartner Research Group – authors of the novel concept – have identified as the “Hype Cycle.” And it fits remarkably well into the pattern of excitement and subsequent dejection associated with any number of seemingly breakthrough innovations introduced over the past 15 years. Understanding that early enthusiasm is only a first phase in the life-cycle of new technologies can help to put them in perspective – a scarce commodity in the fast-paced world of medical product development. As a result, the fundamentals of hype cycle analysis have been adapted into the planning process at Medrad – the Pittsburgh-based maker of specialty contrast media injection systems used in tandem with various medical imaging technologies. “What we find is that if we map the medical technologies we’re interested in along this cycle, we can clarify our thinking as to whether this is a very early look at something that has yet to go through this cycle of inflated and deflated expectations, or whether it’s a relatively mature technology,” according to Don DeLauder, Medrad’s Director of Product Innovation and Advanced Development. “We want to be able to communicate that to the people who receive these roadmaps so they understand the relative levels of risk.” Looking out Technology roadmaps including hype cycles, which attempt to project the various trends and technologies affecting Medrad’s market space over the next two to five years, are planning tools the company introduced in 2002, according to DeLauder. They are used to map general trends in technology as well as those which specifically target the company’s own esoteric market niche. “We try to understand: what does that mean for us? What are the technologies involved in doing that? Is there some new product that might be needed?” he said. “We know about this technology coming along and we ask ourselves: is there anything Medrad can do here?” An emerging trend toward magnetic resonance technology with twice the power of current scanners would be one example. Computed tomography imaging with multiple detectors is another. “Way back, CT scanners started out with a single X-Ray detector. Over time, they went to two detectors and then four detectors. In the last two years or so, there’s been a shift to 16 detectors. The value of that is you can now do really fast CT scans – a scan can be over in a matter of seconds where previously it took minutes. And that has several implications for us. One is you can now do a lot more interesting cardiac work – looking at things that move fast in the body. So maybe we need to more carefully consider selling to cardiologists, not just radiologists. Another implication is because the scans are so fast, our injectors need to inject much faster and with more precise timing. So that implies certain technology developments are needed,” he said. Looking in However Medrad’s technology roadmaps, while useful in understanding the world outside, constitute only one aspect of the company’s roadmapping efforts. The other, which has been in place since the late 1990s, looks at the company’s own product lines and at emerging opportunities in each of the specialized markets it serves: magnetic resonance, X-ray, computed tomography, ultrasound, and angiographic cardiovascular imaging. The resulting product roadmaps form an integral part of Medrad’s ongoing portfolio review process by laying out the company’s product lines in each mode over a five-year period. What sorts of issues do they address? “Will this product have a second generation, and a third generation?” DeLauder suggests. “If so, when will that come out? And what features will that generation have? So to the extent we can, we map out for five years what our products will be and what features they will have. To some degree, we also map how much investment will go into each of those products and what kind of pricing we think we can get. For the farther out stuff… that’s more difficult to do. “Then there’s a process of reconciling all the wish lists. If we want to develop six products in MR and ten products in CT and five products in CV, at some point we have to recognize that our capacity may be lower than our appetite. So there’s a reconciliation where we say, okay, we’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do that, these three we are going to do, and so on. That whole process takes 3 or 4 months, every year,” he said. Medrad’s product line roadmaps, which span a five year period, tend to be highly detailed for the first two years including specific products, features, costs, prices, and more. But the last three years are typically much less comprehensive. “You can forecast it in detail, but there would be no point because it would change so much,” DeLauder said. “You would have a lot of precision and no accuracy. We’ve got a lot more specificity and focus on the nearer-term opportunities. And the things that are five years out, we just want to know about.” Map reading So who gets to see the results of Medrad’s roadmapping efforts? “We’re broadly communicative about our roadmaps, internally at least,” he said. “Anybody who wants to see one of these roadmaps could easily get a copy – that’s not an issue. They’re intentionally shared with anybody and everybody who’s involved in product development. But even more than that, we make sure that our operations people who will have to build the product three years from now understand what’s coming down the pike so that they can start developing manufacturing capacity. “But I would not include our sales people. One of the things you have to be particularly careful about in developing medical products is that you can’t market something that hasn’t been approved. We want them to focus on selling what we have now. And product plans change over time: maybe we won’t do the product, or it maybe it comes out in a very different form from what we originally communicated, or maybe we delay it a year. We’d get them all psyched up and ready to sell it and then a year goes by before it’s really available,” DeLauder observed. “So we tend not to communicate plans like that to them until we’re deep in development. About six months to eight months ahead of time, we begin our sales training, and service training efforts.
“We also have a ‘thought leader’ process where we try to engage a select handful of real thought leaders who are pushing the envelope. We engage in fairly rich discussions with them and we would share our roadmaps with them.” But even that form of sharing has its limits. “As a company, we’re very, very careful to use non-disclosure agreements to make sure we protect our proprietary interest as well as our intellectual property,” he said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
