CBC Innovation Breakfast: Lessons from 30 years of MedTech innovation

In this talk, Steve Blatcher, Product Development Director at Team Consulting, will summarise key learnings from a 30 year career in medical device innovation and research. Steve will give his thoughts on what it takes to cost effectively innovate in the highly constrained and regulated world of MedTech product design.

The key is to balance requirements and constraints related to commercial viability, desirability and technical feasibility. Simply put, your product will not be successful if there is no clear market need, if it is not attractive to users and if you are unable to engineer the necessary levels of performance and reliability at an appropriate cost and to a level appropriate for regulatory compliance.

Successful development needs the right balance between these three factors, ensuring they work in harmony to help you create a product that truly stands out in the market. Steve will share his this on how best to achieve this.

Steve Blatcher is Product Development Director at Team Consulting, where he is responsible for keeping Team at the cutting edge of medical product innovation.

Steve has over 30 years’ experience developing novel medical products, ranging from surgical and interventional devices through to precision drug delivery, regenerative therapies and novel diagnostics. He now leads a team of over 100 engineering, design, human factors, scientific and regulatory consultants, united by the principles of design thinking and world leading in the rapid translation of novel technologies from initial idea through to award-winning, highly differentiated medical products.

Prior to joining Team, Steve co-founded and led the high-tech start-up PlaqueTec, developing a novel intracoronary catheter to detect coronary biomarkers, as well as Radial Cradle, a novel approach to managing radiation exposure for interventional cardiologists.

Prior to this, Steve worked for leading technology consultancies in the Cambridge, UK, cluster, helping pharmaceutical, biotechnology and MedTech companies recognise, understand and act on opportunities for new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.