Innovative Product Development and Technology Adoption for Medical Applications - Biomaterials Science: An Integrated Clinical and Engineering Approach - page 275

the reasoning between individuals. Therefore, the terms early adopter , change
agent , and innovator were coined by Everett Rogers (Rogers 1995). When we
transition technology from one industry or usage to another market, we fre-
quently find a totally different group of acceptance factors. Even though the
imaging technology may be used in both veterinary science and in human
medical diagnosis, the factors affecting its adoption are not the same.
Connecting with the Medical Institutions, Doctors,
and Nurses and Learning Their Needs
When you have an idea for a medical device that might benefit the doctor
or nurse in the diagnosing or treatment of specific ailments, how do you get
the specific requirements defined? Many medical institutions have their own
research departments. This also holds for universities with medical teach-
ing professors who are interested in spinning off their research projects
into startup companies or licensing their inventions for royalty profits. This
involves primarily the transition of technology from a medical research lab-
oratory to a medical research product. However, much technology is devel-
oped in one area of application and transitioned to a totally different area of
medical application.
Just as in other fields, the development of technology doesn't always hap-
pen in the field of use that the inventor thought he or she was working on
at the time. This cross-fertilization is evident in many historical and current
developments. The key question is how to determine whether the technol-
ogy meets the requirements that the users will adopt? There are a number
of adoption criteria in the theoretical works of Rogers, Ajzen, Fishbein, and
Davis that relate the adoption of innovation to the medical areas. By examin-
ing some of these theoretical factors and by looking at some other techniques
used by leading-edge thinkers such as Edison and da Vinci, we can form a
process that gives us some clues about the development of critical medical
devices that will be used in clinical practices on a wide scale.
Spending Time with the Customers in Their Environment
Who has a better feel for the challenges and issues faced by the customer than
the blue-collar technician who listens every day to the complaints about “if
they had only put this handle on the left rather than the right of the machine,
it would have taken half the time to do this procedure”? Listening to the
customer is not always a major part of the researcher's day in the laboratory.
I'd be very surprised to find out that a researcher came up with the idea of
using an automotive manufacturing robot to do brain surgery. So how did
a system such as the CyberKnife get developed? I use this example because