Tuesday and Wednesday I attended a conference. It is quite difficult to sit on one spot for 6 hours in a row right after having a nice active vacation for 3 weeks :) But I managed :)
As it goes with conferences there is a formal banquet - this was on Tuesday. On the first coffee break I met a nice crowd of Spanish entrepreneurs so banquet was whole lot more fun thanks to them. At the end of the second day we attended a short shopping trip :) and had a wonderful dinner at The Cheesecake Factory in city-center. I was in heaven, with all the possible flavors of the godly cheesecakes - they had a whole menu for the cakes! YUMM!
On Thursday I had a wonderful opportunity to visit Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center (M2D2) in Lowell. We were taken there with a bus, once arrived we got a very thorough overview of how the development center (or rather an incubator for medical device startups) was created and how it is built up for entrepreneurs to get their innovations to the market. Next the local entrepreneurs gathered to have lunch with us and gradually each one of them gave an overview of their products, basically they gave their pitch :)
Just to name a few:
Infobionic - they are developing MoMe system with the first product being cardiac arrhythmias detection
206 Ortho - they are developing next generation bone fracture fixation technology where no major surgery is needed
Another one was developing a new kind of needle technology where needle stick injuries would be prevented
One then there were some very specific ones that I can't even start to explain with my own words... like VasoTech for an example :)
All those amazing inventions coming out of there! The way this development center collaborates with University of Massachusetts is another innovation to talk about. There are three departments that work very closely with the development center - engineering, business and medical department. Any market analysis that needs to get done is carried out by the students in business school for an example - this way the students have real life cases to work on as well. Medical facilities have all the needed laboratories and devices available for the experiments and trials that the startups need. It is all just that simple, with some amount of co-operation all the bits and pieces are tied into one full life cycle of product development. Boston area is famous for such settings of course as there are just such great universities around here.
The trip to Lowell was definitely an eye-opener of how university and startup scene can be tied into one whole innovation center.
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| Boston World Trade Center |
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| My heaven :D :D |
Just to name a few:
Infobionic - they are developing MoMe system with the first product being cardiac arrhythmias detection
206 Ortho - they are developing next generation bone fracture fixation technology where no major surgery is needed
Another one was developing a new kind of needle technology where needle stick injuries would be prevented
One then there were some very specific ones that I can't even start to explain with my own words... like VasoTech for an example :)
All those amazing inventions coming out of there! The way this development center collaborates with University of Massachusetts is another innovation to talk about. There are three departments that work very closely with the development center - engineering, business and medical department. Any market analysis that needs to get done is carried out by the students in business school for an example - this way the students have real life cases to work on as well. Medical facilities have all the needed laboratories and devices available for the experiments and trials that the startups need. It is all just that simple, with some amount of co-operation all the bits and pieces are tied into one full life cycle of product development. Boston area is famous for such settings of course as there are just such great universities around here.
The trip to Lowell was definitely an eye-opener of how university and startup scene can be tied into one whole innovation center.
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| Boston city view |
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