Engineering and Marketing Collaboration: A Case Study of a Medical Device Company

Abstract

Innovation in the medical device industry has the potential to alleviate a growing burden on global healthcare costs through improving diagnostics, increasing efficacy of patient treatment, improving quality of life and, ultimately, saving more lives. While the overall innovation process for medical devices is well understood, the details of the front end of innovation are not as well defined. The front end of innovation (FEI) is the first step in the innovation process where new technical and market ideas and opportunities can be identified and deeply developed, and it shapes the success of new medical devices during later new product development and commercialisation phases of innovation. Despite its importance, the FEI is not well understood due to high levels of fuzziness which is characterised by uncertainty ambiguity and complexity. Two essential functions involved in medical device innovation that work closely at the FEI are engineering and marketing. Collaboration between R&D and marketing in the literature has been characterised as both vital to successful innovation but also full of conflict and friction. Despite these challenges, engineering and marketing collaboration is important for successful innovation at the FEI and subsequent success of the medical device innovation. The objective of this study is to understand how engineering and marketing collaborate at the front end of innovation in a medical device company. To address the objective, an exploratory single case study on a medical device company based in New Zealand was conducted. The findings uncovered three dimensions that influence collaboration between marketing and engineering, which were knowledge communication, resource allocation and coordination of collaboration. These findings then were used to develop a framework for improving collaboration between engineering and marketing at the FEI within the case company which involves developing a collaborative culture and improving resource allocation for better coordination of collaboration. This research contributes to both the front end of innovation literature as well as collaboration literature by proposing a collaboration coordination framework for the front end of innovation. The findings from this exploratory case study provide an avenue for future research into testing the impact of a collaboration framework at the front end of innovation and further exploring how other roles involved in product development can impact collaboration at the front end of innovation in a medical device company.