The Fogarty Institute For Innovation: A Device Incubator For Difficult Times
Executive Summary
Go to any gathering of medical device start-up CEOs and their investors, and beneath a veneer of passionate intensity about individual technology lie concern, anxiety, and in some cases, real pessimism. Central to the debate: is the device innovation model broken? Six years ago, one of the most celebrated device entrepreneurs, Tom Fogarty, MD, working with officials at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA, an independent community hospital located in the heart of the San Francisco device community, launched the Fogarty Institute for Innovation, an initiative designed to help the earliest-stage companies ramp up technology development quickly and efficiently in an effort to minimize, if not eliminate the external challenges. To date, the Institute has started or nurtured five companies.