Innovation is important in medtech and many other industries. But what does it really mean – and can it be done with speed?

That was the question that a panel of experts – moderated by William Betten of Betten Solutions – grappled with today at DeviceTalks West in Orange County, Calif. It turns out that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to innovation.

Here were some of the major insights:

1. Sometimes you need to go slow in order to go fast, said Scott Thielman, CTO and co-founder of Product Cration Studio. That includes taking time with the initial meetings, information gathering and decisions that you need to get right to be efficient down the road. “There are portions of that process where you have to move at the speed of human rather than the Internet. … Know when to go slow in order to go fast. … Know when to put your foot on the gas.”
2. “It all starts with understanding what is the unmet need you have to solve,” said Jeff Gross, CTO of Canary Medical. Perhaps it’s process flow, such as helping to streamline how nurses do their jobs in a hospital setting. Perhaps it’s a clinical unmet need. (Think how TAVI provided a valve replacement option for seniors who were not good candidates for open surgery.)
3. With health reform and the rise of value-based care, innovation is so much more than just the device these days, said Annie Cashman, global segment manager for medical at Proto Labs. “It’s not just about the device. It’s about the nurse that’s touching the device … all the people being brought into the ecosystem of medtech are being thought of.”
4. Demonstrating clinical benefit is highly important – whether it is about increasing efficiency or creating a clinical benefit, said Jeff Wyman, VP of InVentures at Smith & Nephew. “End-to-end procedure is much more interest to the payers and the providers than just to the device itself,” Wyman said.

To sum it up, the panelists said innovation is much more complicated than it used to be.