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Biodesign Innovation Documented in New Book

Dressed in a dark sports jacket and crisp button-down shirt that makes him look slightly out of place, Stefanos Zenios works the room, a lab with tables of grad students and doctors at Stanford Medical School. He listens as one group discusses a treatment approach to sleep apnea. At the first pause he asks: "In one sentence, what is the value proposition of the product?"

Students appreciate this question. "The other faculty members are physicians, and they are very technically and clinically oriented," says Ravi Pamnani, a graduate student in engineering. "People can get lost in the technology or clinical aspects. He asks you the basic business questions to make sure you're asking them."

New textbook "Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies"

New textbook "Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies"

 

Welcome to Biodesign Innovation, the path-breaking Stanford course for doctors, engineers, and business students who, over two quarters in small, cross-disciplinary groups, identify a medical need and an invention to fill it, create business plans, and present them to venture capitalists.

The forerunners to this cross-disciplinary program began in engineering schools decades ago to deal with such health problems as weightlessness for astronauts. Later, engineers became involved in designing physical devices like hip replacements. Stanford took collaboration many steps further and in 2005 added the perspective of business management when health care operations expert Stefanos Zenios of the Business School joined the biodesign faculty.

Zenios "transformed what the class does," because of his "deep understanding of the innovation process," says Paul Yock, the Martha Meier Weil Professor in the School of Medicine and a professor of bioengineering with courtesy appointments in the Engineering and Business schools. He and Todd Brinton, a clinical assistant professor in medicine, co-teach the course with Zenios.

The object is not to establish medical technology companies, Yock says, though one or more usually come from each year's course. The point is to develop the observational and conceptual skills that graduate students need from fields besides their own. Zenios focuses students on how to get investors to fund the long development period of their products and insurers to pay for these products when doctors use them in patient care.

This fall, the teaching team took another step by turning their course reader into the first comprehensive textbook for what Zenios sees as a new direction in medical device innovation. Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies (Cambridge University Press), co-edited with Yock and Josh Makower, a consulting associate professor in medicine, helps innovators master a three-phase biodesign process: identifying a medical need, inventing a device or service, and implementing its use.

"We believe the book is a template for teaching innovation and entrepreneurship in industry verticals as opposed to the industry-agnostic approach that has been the norm in business schools," Zenios says. By that he means that entrepreneurs in  medical technology need analytical skills to address constraints in health care systems. The constraints also require collaboration among people trained in the differing ways of approaching problems.

GSB alumni are among the 100-plus individuals who contributed insights to the book, says Lyn Denend, the book's principal writer. Here are a few of their business-related insights:

Moshe Pinto, MBA '07, CEO of Spiracur Inc., a developer of technology for healing tissue, on internet patent searches:

"If you run a search on the words ‘pressure sores,' you will get 60,000 patents. There is an initial evaluation of the patents that almost anyone can do just looking at the abstracts. But when it's time to derive conclusions, it's important to have someone who is legally savvy."

Colin Cahill, MBA '06, CEO of Simpirica Spine, working on a minimally invasive spinal implant for treating back pain, on choosing advisors:

"You need to find a doctor who thinks for him or herself and isn't trying to come up with a right-sounding answer. … Using a variety of sources to understand an expert's reputation is important before
committing."

Dr. Frederic Moll, Sloan '88, founder and CEO of Hansen Medical, which specializes in surgical robotics, on intellectual property strategy:

"You need to have a disciplined way to … collect invention disclosures and turn them into a continuous stream of new filings that protect the newer aspects of the technology."

Ellen Koskinas, MBA '93, partner at venture capital firm InterWest Partners, on effective business plans:

"Be really clear about the product's value proposition, why it's superior to existing or emerging competitors' technologies, and how the different constituencies [physicians, patients, payers] are impacted."

Darin Buxbaum, MBA '07, president and CEO of HourGlass Technologies, which is developing treatments for the morbidly obese, on disclosures to potential investors:

"You don't want to disclose anything that you wouldn't be comfortable sharing with a competitor."

--by Meredith Alexander Kunz and Kathleen O'Toole