Network of Excellence in Surgical Research: the Smit Map Experience

Incremental innovation in biomedical devices is relatively straightforward. Product line gets upgraded to become smaller, faster, cheaper, etc ? but there?s little fundamental change to underlying technologies, clinical procedures, health service provision, regulatory requirements, and so on. It is hard for a single centre to identify and capture the disruptive opportunities that arise at the interfaces between clinical procedures and research into medicine, biology, engineering, physics and mostly it is even often very risky. The purpose of the excellence platform is to create a dedicated process, organisation and network that binds together researchers from across these fields with clinicians, health service providers, biomedical device companies and funders/investors, to identify and rapidly implement mutually beneficial opportunities. The Network can become the tool to complete the transfer of development activities to the corporate partner(s) activities during the Pre-Clinical Trials Phase of the process. The partners can conduct world-class research and development in several areas promising valuable advances for patients,healthcare providers and life science companies alike.