How to build a successful medical device company: CMR Surgical
CUTalks by CUTEC
In 2014, Martin Frost, Luke Hares, Paul Roberts and Mark Slack founded a company called Cambridge Medical Robotics with the mission to transform surgery with medical technology. Over five years, they grew the company to more than 500 employees, quickly raised record-breaking sums of funding and launched their product Versius, an innovative surgical robot system. Now called CMR Surgical, the Cambridge-based company is a great example of a successful medical device company.
In the tech entrepreneurship podcast CUTalks by CUTEC, co-founder and former CEO Martin Frost talks about their company’s journey and highlights their successes and challenges. There are five key principles he mentions that are important when starting a medical device company:
Be purpose-driven
Many companies are value-driven and have one goal: increase shareholder wealth. While this is the fundamental purpose of any company, healthcare and MedTech companies are special, as they ultimately have an impact on the health of people. Martin Frost explains the company’s purpose-driven philosophy of changing people’s life, not just having a great product. Their idea was to give minimal access surgery to people who don’t have access to it and thereby transform surgery. This fundamental purpose helped them to create excellence in many parts of the company, including quality management, talent recruitment and product design. Asking the key questions why you are doing this and what the goal of your mission is helps to motivate the whole team to work towards achieving this goal. Passion is great, but only purpose can get you to the top.
Understand your market
At an early stage, the company had to identify what the users of the future product wanted. By collaborating closely with clinicians at Addenbrooke’s hospital, CMR surgical was able to understand their needs and build a product that suits the market. Evidently, clinical collaborations help MedTech companies to facilitate and speed up the medicalisation of their product, including going through trials and building future customer relations.
Put users and patients in the focus
Successful products are user friendly. Simplicity and intuitive design can guide the product development process and help to boost its usage. CMR Surgical’s robot assists clinicians without requiring them to massively adapt to using it. For surgical procedures, clinicians don’t have time to experiment and failure in doing so might cost human lives. User feedback was incredibly positive for Versius, which surprised surgical teams about how much benefit the product can give them with its simple usability. To make a device as easy as possible to use, the user should be in the focus of product development and in clinical settings, the patient too. You simply won’t sell your product if people don’t want to use it.
Choose the right team
Companies are only as good as their people. Cambridge is undoubtedly a place with exceptional talent, especially in the areas of science, medicine and engineering. Every company is looking for the best talent, and as the company grew, CMR surgical had to expand their efforts and recruit from other places too. The founding team had extensive expertise and great diversity which is essential as a first step to convince investors that they can indeed do what they envision. In fact, the four founders all had different backgrounds and experiences, ranging from accounting, technology and product design, physics and engineering, to clinical medicine. Adding more people to the team means to recognise the company’s culture and assess people’s fit with it. When working well together, a team will be more likely and much faster to reach their goal.
Be agile
Originating from software development, agile methodologies are now widely used in companies to keep up with the racing speed of new technologies. Growing a company from four founders to over 500 employees in just six years requires flexibility, efficiency and adaptability and thus, agility. Product development work started to expand from actual engineering towards the medicalisation of the product, requiring many different processes. By implementing and following various agile methods, complicated and obstructive business processes won’t decrease the speed towards the mission’s goal. The MedTech market is constantly flooded with new technologies and bright ideas, so being agile means being prepared.
The journey from the idea for new technologies to marketable products is long and difficult, especially in the MedTech field. “The UK is not good at building medical devices”, says Martin Frost. But the development of Versius in just above five years and the story of the company demonstrate that it is possible, and Cambridge might be a great environment to start this. The skills required to build medical devices are partially existent, and yet need to be developed and improved. Besides fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering and medicine, we need to provide our future talent with the skills required for medical device development.
Eventually, the goal of CMR Surgical is to become a global medical device company. And it has a great recipe to become one.
Listen to Martin Frost’s interview here.
CUTalks by CUTEC
CUTalks by CUTEC is a leading podcast series for tech founders, aiming to shed light on typical and not so typical journeys in entrepreneurship by talking to a range of inventors, founders, investors and experts. You can find the episodes here and follow on your favourite podcast channel for the latest episodes. The hosts of the podcast are Shreya Singhal (Medical student with a background in Engineering, interested in biotech) and Thomas Bohne (researcher at the Institute for Manufacturing).
About the author
Daniel Kottmann is a PhD student in Medicine at the University of Cambridge working on new therapeutics to treat lung cancer. He is currently leading the Cambridge MedTech Foundation Innovation Programme, an educational programme to introduce students to medical device development by solving real clinical problems. Daniel is interested in medical innovation, new technologies and entrepreneurship in healthcare.
