Managing Medical Technological Innovations

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• About the Editors
• Contents
• Introduction

This study analyzes publications in the field of wearable technologies (WTs) recorded in the Scopus database during the period 2000–2016. Using bibliometric analysis, we probe into the current status and direction of research on WTs. In addition, we use cluster analysis to reveal keywords with highest frequency and identify technology trends over time amongst research activities. The study provides researchers and practitioners with insights that help to identify trends in WTs research. The study also highlights potential research directions, and is therefore expected to benefit researchers in the area of WTs.

This chapter reviews the creation and the development of biotechnology start-ups in Japan known as “bioventures”. In the early 1990s, the Japanese government began to introduce new policies to promote the development of bioventures. Within the span of a decade, the number of bioventures grew five times. However, majority of them continued to operate at the seed or start-up stage. This chapter seeks to explore the underdeveloped state of bioventures in Japan, based on the case study method which includes the use of interviews and reviews of several policies and regulations. This chapter also compares the development of the biotechnology industry in Japan with that in the US and Europe. This chapter concludes that the lack of a sustainable system of funding is the real issue hindering the development of bioventures in Japan.

Hospital reusable medical equipment (RME) include any items that are intended to be reprocessed and reused indefinitely, including surgical instruments, dental equipment, endoscopes, and others. Such equipment represent a significant portion of a hospital’s inventory costs and recently have generated significant patient cross-contamination concerns due to reprocessing cleaning failures. This chapter discusses recent applications of industrial and systems engineering (ISyE) methods within healthcare organizations to help manage, understand, and improve RME processes, including quality control, reliability, patient safety, facility layout, queueing networks, and inventory management models. Several examples demonstrate the value of these approaches for improved reprocessing management of RME technology.

We analyze how Japanese pharmaceutical firms internationalized their research and development (R&D) investments during the 1980s and 1990s. In order to tap into foreign knowledge bases, they heavily invested in setting up R&D canters abroad. However, knowledge transfer, evidenced by international patent applications, was very limited during the early phase of globalization. As a response, Japanese firms have shifted their R&D strategy toward a better organizational integration of their foreign units.

Technology innovation and its evolutionary path can be explored by patent analysis. Therefore, for those firms which need a large investment and high business performance, such as those that manufacture stents, integrating patent information with business strategy is the critical issue. The competition among stent manufactures is intensifying because of the increase in global demand. From the resource-based view, adopting a co-opetition strategy is the essential way for the firms to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. In the last decade, patents have become a major tool of the co-opetition strategy. This chapter applies patent data in USPTO during 1984–2005 and constructs patent indicators by patent information to verify the process of technology evolution. On these grounds, we can understand the relative technological position and technological strength of the major manufactures in this industry and also monitor their changes in position and business performance to examine the relationship between each firm’s technology strategy and business strategy.

Over half of all research-oriented partnerships in the biotechnology industry fail due to problems in inter-organizational relationships. The analysis of factors that determine the success of strategic partnerships can help companies reduce the high failure rates. Based on the resource-oriented and relationship-oriented approach, this chapter examines the influence of three structural factors and three dynamic factors on the success of strategic, research-oriented partnerships in the biotechnology industry. In the empirical analysis, data from 48 research collaborations by 28 companies were collected and analyzed. The results confirm the significant influence of the factors “complementary resources”, “operational compatibility”, “bilateral exchange of information”, and “opportunistic behavior”. On the basis of these findings, companies can identify approaches to influence the success of their own research collaborations. In particular, appropriate recommendations for action can be derived in the context of the structural design of partnerships and the dynamic exchange process.

Using a case study of Acclarent, a medical device company, this chapter attempts to propose a framework to further illustrate the process of open innovation in the medical device industry. We examined five elements in the mechanism of the open innovation process. This chapter shows how the success of Acclarent — a medical device start-up — depends on effective management of the flow of knowledge to satisfy unmet needs, while integrating in-depth knowledge of FDA regulations and third-party payers’ reimbursement policies into the product innovation process.

Technological complexity is an inevitable challenge for latecomer firms aiming to upgrade themselves. Applying a perspective of firms within a sectoral system of innovation, this chapter studies the catch-up efforts of the leading Chinese pharmaceutical firms in the past few decades. The findings show that technological complexity tends to lengthen the catch-up process, raises capability requirement, requires more networking, and demands complicated institution design, which asks for a more evolutionary catch-up strategy with self-investment into system capability and network competence. The findings of this chapter provide references for catch-up efforts in other industries with technological complexity.

Disruptive technology platforms from emerging companies hold great promise for exploiting innovation, but often face legitimacy hurdles due to their liability of newness. Nascent firms must learn new roles with limited precedent and establish ties with an environment that may not fully understand or value their existence. Using a legitimacy-based lens in the context of the bio-technology industry, we posit a sequential construct — cognitive, regulative, and normative legitimacy — to evaluate emergent technology platforms. Our model of biotechnology platform emergence may provide insights for understanding how break-throughs achieve legitimacy in the scientific community, mobilize resources and talent, and attain commercial success.

The research goal of this chapter is to explore and explain the relation between ambiguity management and contextual ambidexterity in innovation. Based on qualitative analysis of case data, a model is presented showing how managing ambiguity is an underlying process of contextual ambidexterity. Requisite variety, perspective-taking, and interpretive skills help generate ambiguity to achieve exploration, while analytic skills help reduce ambiguity to achieve exploitation. Contextual ambidexterity is achieved through a process of alternating between generation, sustention, and reduction of ambiguity. High ambiguity tolerance (AT) emphasizes exploration, while low AT emphasizes exploitation. The findings contribute to a more detailed theoretical understanding of the contextual ambidexterity concept and can help practitioners to achieve contextual ambidexterity in their innovation projects.

In this chapter, we challenge the traditional notion of ambiguity as an undesirable element in New Product Development (NPD) and explore how companies sometimes sustain or even increase ambiguity during their NPD projects. Based on qualitative analysis of case data from four NPD projects in the medical devices industry, we present a model by which this process can be better understood. We identify four ways that NPD projects can benefit from temporarily sustaining ambiguity: retaining fallback options, saving costs, saving time, and retaining ideas.

This chapter offers a model for effectively managing ambiguity at the fuzzy front end of innovation projects. The innovation process is characterized by cycles of expensive (explorative) activities where ambiguity increases, and constrictive (exploitative) activities where ambiguity decreases. We argue that ambiguity oscillates in the short run and decreases in the long run while learning increases. These fluctuations in the opportunity space are driven by the balancing of creativity and constraint. We conducted in-depth studies of four new product development projects from the medical device industry. Through the abductive process of iterative grounded theory, we built a model for the management of ambiguity. The model we propose shows that innovation teams that have a higher tolerance for ambiguity are better able to exploit it. The successful management of ambiguity in innovation projects rests upon the balancing of opposing needs.

This chapter addresses the key issues impacting the adoption of information technology (IT) in healthcare organizations. Four case studies were developed from different hospitals through a series of in-depth interviews to determine the factors affecting their IT adoption. The findings reveal that, at the organization level, these hospitals primarily make decisions to adopt new technologies based on project-related costs. At the individual level, the complications in the implementation process play a major role as they are influenced by human-related issues. Apart from the identification of key factors from the case studies, the latter part of this chapter also presents the mental framework of IT adoption for healthcare organizations developed based on the technology acceptance model.

Innovation projects are prone to “escalation of commitment” (the tendency to continue projects even if it is clear that they will be unsuccessful). In this study, we introduce a construct measuring the escalation prevention potential (EPP) of innovation projects as perceived by individuals in the organization. EPP consists of three components: (1) goals, (2) process, and (3) ability, to shield projects from escalation to commitment. A survey was conducted among 1,062 clinicians working in hospitals implementing electronic medical records (EMRs). The empirical results show that the three theoretical components of EPP sum up to a single measure. Four organizational characteristics of organizations (organizational routines, leadership reflexivity, employee involvement, and support staff quality) explain a large share of the variation in EPP.

Adoption processes are often heavily influenced by interpersonal communication. Marketing managers are increasingly trying to use these relationships to foster the market penetration of their products. In an empirical study of the US market for an innovative medical device, we survey the social network of (mostly chief) anesthetists from 151 hospitals. We confirm the influences from personal communication on individual adoption decisions through hazard regressions. We then use a multi-agent modeling framework trying to identify what seeding strategies would have been optimal to achieve a fast market penetration, i.e., which and how many anesthetists should be selected to initiate personal communication processes.