Roadmap for identifying clinical needs in technology-driven innovations: The Senso-eAXON case

Abstract

Innovation in medical technologies has a lot of shapes and comes from a variety of sources. One of the dimensions in which it can be classified is the motor of the innovation, either the market or the technology. Innovation can be need-driven, in which a technology is a result of a demand from the market or it can be technology-driven in which scientific discoveries and technical know-how are pushed into the marketplace to find a correspondent application and need to cover for a certain technology. It is debatable whether it is preferable to innovate with a need-driven approach or with a technology-driven approach. In the case of medical devices, it is recommended by experts to use a need-driven or market pull approach, thus the technology-driven, also known as technology push approach, is practically neglected in the literature. In this way, this study proposes a roadmap for identifying clinical needs in technology push innovations. A roadmap was developed through a systematic literature review, interviews with experts in the field of medical technologies innovations and through the participation in the identification of potential needs for a technology push innovation: Senso-eAXON, which consists on an implantable wireless sensor. A detailed description of the characteristics of the technology was done and a study of possible clinical applications was carried out with the support of healthcare professionals. The proposed roadmap consists of four steps that provide key information for technology push entrepreneurs to identify relevant clinical applications and to guide them to initiate the inclusion of a technology into the market.