“For years, universities thought that it was good enough to invent something and throw it over the fence for the business world to implement,” Yock said. “But that’s a flawed model. The interplay of stakeholders involved in getting new medical technologies into patient care is incredibly complex. You have to take all of their perspectives into account before even beginning to invent.”
“The fundamental premise is that innovation is a discipline — a process that can be learned, practiced and perfected,” said Makower, the Boston Scientific Applied Biomedical Engineering Professor and the lead architect of the approach to inventing that has become known as the biodesign innovation process.
Stanford Biodesign’s first educational offering was the Innovation Fellowship, a hands-on, full-time program in which, over the course of an academic year, 12 medical professionals, engineers and business experts work in teams to identify unmet needs; screen those needs to determine which problem, if solved, would have the greatest impact on patient care; invent a solution; and ready it for the market.
Added later were project-based graduate and undergraduate courses in which students in medicine, engineering and business learn and apply the biodesign process in a more abbreviated way. The center also developed a fellowship for Stanford medical and engineering faculty interested in entrepreneurship, an executive education program, and seed grant programs so trainees can work on promising projects after completing their fellowships and courses.
Stanford Biodesign has trained 182 innovation fellows, 2,225 Stanford students and 74 Stanford faculty members. Fifty-two companies have been founded based on technologies invented at Stanford Biodesign, and those technologies — such as a wrist stimulator that relieves hand tremors caused by essential tremor and a wound irrigation system that prevents surgical site infections — have helped more than 4 million patients.
“My goal was to equip young innovators with the tools, expertise and connections they need to identify meaningful problems in health care, invent medical devices that solve those problems, and bring those devices to the bedside to help the providers and patients who need them,” said Yock, who holds the Martha Meier Weiland Professorship and is the director emeritus of Stanford Biodesign.
Sharing the Biodesign process
To help innovators beyond Stanford, Yock, Makower and their team codified their innovation process in a first-of-its-kind textbook. Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies is in its second edition; has sold over 20,000 copies; and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean. More recently, Stanford Biodesign developed a more accessible set of learning materials: The Student Guide to Biodesign, a modular, multimedia series, is freely available to anyone in the world.
For years, universities thought that it was good enough to invent something and throw it over the fence for the business world to implement.
To spread its approach to aspiring innovators around the globe, Stanford Biodesign developed partner programs in India, Japan, Ireland and Singapore, among others. Some of these programs started as joint fellowships in which trainees from other countries came to Stanford to learn the biodesign process, then returned home to introduce the process to their own countries. The goal is to address problems in care abroad as well as launch innovation training programs. The center has had a hand in inspiring and advising more than 30 educational programs in 18 countries.
After completing an educational program with Stanford Biodesign, some trainees start companies to bring their technologies to the market, while others return to medical practice with a new understanding of how to evaluate and address the problems they see. Still others lead innovation within larger health technology companies. Nearly all the alumni share their knowledge and expertise with aspiring innovators, creating a multiplier effect, Yock said: “The real product of Stanford Biodesign is the innovators we train.”
Stanford Biodesign has also launched initiatives to improve racial and gender diversity within Stanford Biodesign’s programs and in the larger innovation community. One example is Diversity by Doing, which is dedicated to improving diversity and inclusion in the health technology innovation ecosystem.
Stanford Biodesign alumni say the program has profoundly affected the way they approach their work.
“You don’t think about problems the same way once you’ve graduated,” said Dorothea Koh, a 2008 fellow and a serial innovator who launched an artificial intelligence chatbot assistant for doctors that provides instant, hospital-specific answers to queries about drugs, clinical tools, hospital protocols and more in Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. “It comes back to a very simple mission, which is to help people.”