Lessons for Achieving Innovation Success

Lessons for Achieving Innovation Success

Lessons for Achieving Innovation Success

Mike Hess and Kurt Smith, Medtronic

Originally presented: November 5, 2020
Watch time: 1 hour

Access the Webcast

2020 Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award (OCI) Winner, Medtronic, is a global leader in the medical technology market. Medtronic has sustained success in this highly competitive market by developing and delivering invention, continuous innovations and disruptive innovations across the continuum of healthcare.

PDMA’s OCI Award recognizes companies like Medtronic which have achieved sustained and quantifiable innovation success and have well defined practices which have contributed to that success. These best and next practices provide valuable learnings for organizations in any industry trying to achieve consistent innovation success.

In this webcast Medtronic will share how the company has combined strategic focus, platform technologies, market knowledge, novel funding approaches and unique innovation tools to maintain market leadership. Among the areas you will learn about is how they engage target markets at the front end of the innovation process to identify and validate problems in the market and how they use tools like crowd sourcing, the Innovation Lab and open innovation to identify potential solutions.

They will discuss how the company is fostering agility in innovation through knowledge assimilation in the knowledge center and how agile development enabled them to deliver ventilators with unique and critical benefits during the pandemic. You will also gain insights about how Medtronic has established a culture of continuous innovation improvement through an internally developed process called Design, Reliability, Manufacturability (DRM).

Don’t miss the opportunity to learn from a company with a proven innovation track record and a company willing to share what it has learned in its innovation journey.


About the Speakers

Mike Hess

Mike Hess, VP of Engineering and Medtronic Fellow has been with Medtronic for 29 years. Working with the corporate Strategic Scientific Operations (SSO) organization and R&D Council Mike is focused on identifying and prioritizing enterprise wide technology initiatives to advance therapy innovation. At Medtronic, Mike has worked in a wide range of leadership roles at Medtronic including therapy R&D management, corporate research and technology, program management, upstream marketing, clinical, and General Management for the Cardiac and Vascular Group (CVG) Brady and Mechanical Circulatory Support (MCS) therapies. He is a Technical Fellow, a member of the Bakken Society and an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) fellow. Mike has 36 issued patents and numerous publications to his credit.

Outside of Medtronic Mike is active on numerous academic advisory boards for the advancement of Biomedical Engineering and has been involved in Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) society and other associations that promote engineering and education. 

Kurt Smith

Dr. Kurt Smith, Vice President, Strategic Innovation has been called a visionary and a pioneer with a proven track record in innovation and entrepreneurship with the unique ability to drive passion in individuals and collaborative teams so that they can achieve their highest potential. Dr. Smith’s current role is focused on identifying strategic innovation bets across Medtronic that have high potential as ventures that leverage external funding. Dr. Smith has made numerous major entrepreneurial contributions to Medtronic, including most recently, the development of the Digital Health Innovation Center which supports digital health and data science across the organization. Over his career at Medtronic, he has played a leading role in the creation of numerous minimally invasive, image-guided diagnostic and ablation platforms including the StealthStation which is recognized as the preeminent surgical navigation system in the world. He also played a key role in establishing Medtronic’s technology center in Shanghai, China.

Dr. Smith is founder of numerous high technology companies and has been involved in the start-up of seventeen ventures including Surgical Navigation Technologies, now Medtronic Navigation. He has been a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado where he founded the Engineering Entrepreneurship Program. He holds over 30 medical and information technology patents and is published in numerous academic publications. He has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, and a Doctor of Science in biomedical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. Today, he is proudly a Medtronic Bakken Fellow.

What did you think of this post?

Start a conversation with your peers by posting to our kHUB Discussion board! Browse trending posts and reply to other thought leaders OR start your own discussion by clicking "Post New Message."

Start a Discussion

If you don't have an account with us, create a guest account or become a member today and receive exclusive access to all PDMA member benefits. Please note that both members and non-members are welcome to participate in the kHUB.