Ideas in Coffee Cups

I know I’m not entrepreneurial. I got plenty of ideas, but I’m risk averse. I’ve never had a safety net and the stakes associated with failure are (to my mind) high. During an unwelcome career break (redundancy), I tried to launch two businesses. The first failed. It might have taken off, but I couldn’t afford to wait for positive feedback to turn into contracts. The second has grown reasonably well but will only ever provide a physically hard-earned income and I’m not getting any younger.

I heard an interview recently between Etienne Nichols of the Global Medical Device Podcast and the author of Someday is TODAY!: Get your ideas out of your coffee cup and on the market, Ron Richard. They were discussing inventions in the medical device sector and ways to turn ideas into reality. I knew that getting products on the market wasn’t easy, but goodness, it sounds really, really hard. The advantage of having high barriers to entry is that only the finest products, or those adequately financed, reach the market. The downside is that many great ideas never see the light of day.

The podcast is worth a listen (#369: Advice to Medical Device Inventors). To its immense credit, it doesn’t sugar-coat reality and dispenses some essential advice. It’s just disappointing to realise that, even if you have an absolutely cracking idea, you will be at an extreme disadvantage unless you’re independently wealthy, have wealthy family and friends or gifted at encouraging others to invest a phenomenal amount of money.

Funding is a massive obstacle. The suggestion that you will either have to spend (or ask family and friends for) $10k to $50k to finance the preliminary development stages is enough to ensure that most ideas will forever live in a coffee cup. Even a simple product, we are told, will cost somewhere between $150k to $250k to launch. Products that require the rigour of phases such as clinical testing and regulatory approval will cost upwards of $2 million.

This isn’t just a medtech issue. It takes a special type of person and a certain amount of resources to take an idea from concept to commercial success, but the medtech sector doesn’t have many soft launch options. There aren’t ways to ‘earn and learn’, producing modest quantities of products that generate revenue to fund development, whilst gathering valuable feedback. With medical devices, you can’t just offer ‘some’ commitment. If you’re in, you’re all in. You’re investing years and £millions with no guarantees of success and certainly no guarantees that the product you are convinced would be in demand today, will still be desirable in 3, 4 or 5 years’ time.

I know there are routes such as grants, incubator programmes and private investors – and it would be undesirable if medical technology was a cottage industry. I just wonder if there are any ways to embrace and incentivise the ideas of people who have the germ of an idea, but lack the courage/recklessness, confidence or the time and resources to turn ideas into reality. It could be the equivalent of a suggestions box, but on a grand scale and with a financial reward if there are future profits. It would tap into a wealth of creativity and technical know-how that is otherwise invisible. The industry would then have an ecosystem to deliver innovation, rather than leaning heavily on the ingenuity of entrepreneurial inventors.

Any such ‘Bank of Great Ideas’ could be organised by industry, academia and/or government. It could be regional, national or global. To my mind, the current environment is too intimidating to encourage innovation on the scale that the medtech sector could deliver. Not everyone is capable of extracting their ideas from their coffee cup. I think this idea has legs, but I’ve got a sizable mortgage and a family – and quite frankly, I need regular income. The best I can do is write about it, spill the coffee and hope that someone mops it up before it seeps away.

Time will tell…

As ever, thoughts and comments welcome.