Medtech companies don’t have an innovation capture problem. They have an innovation harvesting problem.
Every medtech company keeps a Design and Development File because ISO 13485 says you must. Design inputs, outputs, reviews, verification, validation: every decision documented, dated, signed.
You built it for the auditor.
Your founding insight, the one you filed your first patent application for, happened before this file existed. The file is everything since: every hard problem your engineers solved making that insight real. Every failed approach they abandoned. Every workaround that turned out to be the breakthrough.
In most companies, that record gets filed and forgotten. The inventions inside it get lost in time, like tears in the rain, because nobody at the design review is wearing an IP harvesting hat and asking:
“What did we solve here that we couldn’t solve before?”
That’s it. One question, innovation harvest commenced!
The hardest part of innovation harvest is that you need some discipline. For medtech the discipline is already there. The documentation is already there. The culture of “if it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen” is already there.
You are already capturing the IP alongside compliance. You’re just harvesting compliance and not the IP. I am a big believer in building once but benefiting twice, two birds, one stone.
These are the inventions nobody recognises as inventions. They could be your next patent application or the company jewels of a trade secret if only someone asks the right questions at the right time.
Next design review, make it someone’s job to ask the question. Maybe even get the IP team to!
