Investigation of user involvement and collaboration processes in current and future innovative medical technology environments

Abstract: AbstractCurrently the MedTech industry is worldwide driven by the need for innovations. Basing on a long history which produced radical innovations such as the pacemaker, the Swedish MedTech industry in specific has a special reputation. Over the last decades the innovation process advanced thereby by shifting the focus more and more from the company‟s to the user‟s needs and also to an integrated approach of involving them. Especially in the MedTech industry this aspect is given great attention. As a continuation of this, a new medical site called Innovationsplatsen is going to be established within the Karolinska Institute in Huddinge near Stockholm. There different stakeholders such as engineers from companies, medical professionals from the Karolinska institute and researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology can work closely together with an intensive knowledge and idea exchange.Facing this exceptional setting, it is investigated with this thesis how MedTech companies currently perform, measure and document user involvement in the collaboration process. Subsequently an approach and tools are proposed, to support these processes and to overcome the identified drawbacks of the state of the art. By supporting the acquisition of the relevant data, results can be derived then from a subsequent analysis which allows managing the collaboration in the Innovationsplatsen and identifying best practices in a comparison with other similar settings.To investigate the state of the art and answer the question how user involvement is currently performed and measured, six experts in four MedTech companies are consulted repeatedly by means of guided expert interviews. Following to that a closer look at the process documentation of one of these companies is taken, to reveal what information is documented and can be used to investigate the collaboration processes with a network analysis, as well as what information is missing here for proper results. The ensuing development of the proposed approach follows then the Munich Process Model, to ensure a systematic procedure. Here the investigation of the state of the art is picked up and transformed into specific requirements forwhich finally solutions can be identified and adapted. The evaluation of the approach in an expert workshop completes this at last.The findings from the interviews reveal that, although various implementations of user involvement are common practice even within a company, the influence and impact on the value of different strategies is unknown. This can be attributed to the lack of the process documentation which is mainly used to document information for legal reasons. In addition, the evaluation of ideas and input by different actors as well as retrospective analyses of the processes are very often only examined informally. As conclusion the proposed approach introduces then an innovation value system and assessment tool, to weight every actor‟s influence, a continuous data acquisition as well as databases which allow connecting the actors and their properties to another and their ideas in the innovative environment. The proposed approach contributes thereby to collect the relevant data in future development environments and compare them to another. By this means best practices of user involvement can be revealed the communication and collaboration can be improved.