Driving successful medtech innovation

Dr. Stuart Grant explores the critical, yet often misunderstood, roles of customer needs and customer insights in driving successful medtech innovation. While both are acknowledged as vital, the relationship between them remains poorly defined. This lack of clarity hinders innovation teams in effectively leveraging market research to develop groundbreaking medical devices. This article explores the existing definitions of needs and insights, drawing from diverse fields like psychology and marketing, to propose a framework specifically for the medtech sector. Dr. Grant looks at how we can empower innovators to conduct more targeted market research, uncover hidden needs, and ultimately discover actionable insights that fuel the development of truly innovative and impactful medical technologies.

In the high-stakes world of medtech, product innovation is often heralded as the engine of progress. Yet, despite the sector’s relentless pursuit of breakthrough devices, many innovation teams still struggle with a fundamental ambiguity: the distinction between customer needs and customer insights. While both are widely acknowledged as critical to product success, their relationship remains poorly defined, particularly in the early stages of innovation. And this matters because the absence of clarity can impede teams' ability to translate market research into groundbreaking technological innovation – possibly missing key differentiators.

Product innovation in medtech is more than just invention – it is the commercialization of novel ideas that solve real-world problems. As Roberts (2007) succinctly put it, “Innovation = Invention + Exploitation.” This process begins with understanding the market, and at its core lies the ability to identify customer needs and derive insights.

Customer needs are often defined as the problems customers have or what issues a product solves. Griffin and Hauser (1993) described them as “what products let you do, not how you do it.” Insights, on the other hand, are deeper. They represent a restructured understanding of those needs – often non-obvious, sometimes subconscious, and always actionable. As Laughlin (2014) noted, an insight is “a non-obvious understanding of your customers which, if acted upon, has the potential to change their behavior for mutual benefit.”

Despite their importance, the relationship between needs and insights is rarely properly articulated in medtech. Needs are often treated as static checklists, while insights are seen as elusive flashes of brilliance. To clarify, we are not discussing the regulatory requirement of user needs or design inputs/requirements – these are a bit further downstream.

So how do we change this? We must first clarify the terminology. Drawing from a systematic review of literature across disciplines, we can categorize customer needs into several types:

• Articulated needs: Expressed directly by users, often through interviews, questionnaires, or surveys.
• Unarticulated needs: Subconscious or latent needs that users cannot easily express, often through observation.
• Dynamic needs: Needs that evolve over time due to changes in technology or user expectations.
• Emotional and rational needs: Emotional needs relate to user experience and identity, while rational needs concern functionality and performance.

The Kano Model (1984) further classifies needs into:

• Must-be: Basic expectations.
• Performance: Needs that improve satisfaction proportionally.
• Delighters: Unexpected features that create significant satisfaction.

Customer insights, by contrast, are not simply deeper needs. They are the result of interpreting and synthesizing data about needs – often through creative problem-solving. In psychology, insight is defined as a “sudden comprehension or problem solution that involves a reorganization of mental representation” (Kounios & Beeman, 2014). In marketing, it is “deep, embedded knowledge that helps structure thinking and decision-making” (Wills, 2005).

In medtech, we can define a customer insight as: “A non-obvious, actionable understanding of a user’s unmet need, derived through creative interpretation of contextual data, which can guide innovation toward meaningful and differentiated solutions.”

Traditional market research methods – such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups – have long been used to gather customer feedback. These techniques are effective at capturing articulated needs but often fall short in uncovering the deeper, unspoken drivers of behavior. As a result, they can often leave us limited to incremental rather than truly radical innovation – only innovating the Kano performance need trajectory.

To uncover hidden needs, innovation teams must adopt more immersive and interpretive methods. Ethnography, lead-user innovation, repertory grid, and co-creation are particularly valuable in this regard.

Ethnography involves observing users in their natural environments to understand how they interact with products. It captures not just what users say, but what they do – and why. This method is especially powerful in medtech, where device use is often complex, context-dependent, and emotionally charged.

Ethnographic research typically unfolds in two stages:

1. Participant observation: Researchers observe users performing tasks, often recording sessions for later analysis.
2. Contextual interviews: Semi-structured interviews guided by observations, allowing researchers to probe deeper into user motivations and challenges.

This approach reveals those little contradictions between what users say and what they do – critical moments that can spark insight.

Lead-user innovation involves engaging users who are ahead of market trends and can articulate future needs. Co-creation goes a step further, involving users directly in the design process. Both methods foster a deeper understanding of user contexts and can surface needs that traditional methods miss.

The Repertory Grid Technique helps uncover how users perceive and evaluate products by comparing attributes in triads. It reveals the constructs users use to differentiate between products, offering a window into their decision-making processes.

Collecting data is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in analyzing it to uncover insights. Several analytical cues can guide this process:

• Workarounds: Users modifying products to suit their needs.
• Overgeneralizations: Statements like “I always…” that may mask deeper issues.
• Metaphorical glosses: Users downplaying problems with positive language.
• Disjuncture: Gaps between observed behavior and verbal accounts.
• Dissonance: Expressions of confusion or frustration with current solutions.
• Triggers of Use: Situational factors that prompt product use.
• User customization: Modifications that reveal unmet needs.
• Use and misuse of affordances: Design elements that suggest how a product is used.

By systematically reviewing data for these cues, innovation teams can move from raw observations to structured insights.

Insight discovery is not just analytical, it is also creative. In medtech, this might involve identifying a problem during fieldwork, allowing time for subconscious processing, experiencing a breakthrough idea, and then testing it against clinical and commercial criteria.

In this context creativity is a necessity, not a luxury. As Arthur (2007) noted, invention is recursive problem-solving, and at its heart lies an act of individual insight. For medtech innovators, fostering creativity means cultivating deep domain expertise, cognitive flexibility, and intrinsic motivation.

To bridge the gap between needs and insights, I propose the following model:

1. Capture needs: Use a mix of traditional and immersive methods to gather data on articulated and unarticulated needs.
2. Classify needs: Apply frameworks like Kano and Holt’s to categorize needs by type and priority.
3. Analyze for cues: Use analytical triggers to identify patterns, contradictions, and opportunities.
4. Generate insights: Through creative synthesis (there are many tools to do this), reframe problems and uncover non-obvious truths.
5. Validate and iterate: Test insights through prototyping and user feedback, refining as needed.

This model positions insight not as luck but as a structured outcome of rigorous research and creative thinking.

In medtech, we cannot rely on luck. Devices must not only function flawlessly but also meet the nuanced needs of diverse users in complex environments. To innovate effectively, teams must move beyond surface-level needs and uncover the insights that drive meaningful change.

By clarifying the relationship between needs and insights, adopting immersive research methods, and embracing creative analysis, we can empower medtech innovators to develop products that are not only novel but truly impactful.

The future of medtech innovation lies not in asking users what they want – but in understanding what they need, even when they are unable to articulate it themselves.