Many have paused work for a COVID-19 required break. As an essential business, our work did not pause.  We asked our content team of engineers, regulatory, quality, design, and program management creative professionals where they find inspiration for their contributions to medical device development. This blog is about finding inspiration for your work as summer and a return to work loom ahead.

Optics Physicist: I find inspiration by remembering tough challenges I’ve solved in the past. I find it rewarding to solve tough problems. And I always find it enjoyable when the universe surprises me eventually. Sometimes when the surprise springs on you, it’s not quite so enjoyable in the moment. But figuring out what the universe is trying to tell you is always kind of inspirational.

Then I get technical information with a Google scholar search or I’ll look at the American Physical Society, optics and photonics news, Physics Today – places like that to start. By going to the research literature, I see the latest techniques.

Mechanical Engineer: My own interpretation of past work is that we do a design and it has some good parts, and some parts that maybe aren’t perfect. I’m already ready to do the next design and build on the lessons learned and do it better. It’s inspiring to find faults in the last thing you did and try to achieve better. Chasing that forever is kind of … I don’t know if it’s healthy mentally, but it’s definitely fun.

Another inspiration is other medical devices and even non-medical devices. As a mechanical engineer, it’s pretty easy to take apart a McDonald’s toy and say, “Oh, they did this.” Or take apart a car, “Oh, how did they do that?” Or whatever. Lots of different devices are built different ways by different people. This knowledge floating around the human race gets built on by people looking at each other’s devices and seeing what makes sense, what’s a cool idea. What could maybe apply to a new device as well?

Physicist/Entrepreneur: Part of it is just having some quiet time to go kayaking or cycling and allowing time for the connections to happen behind the scenes. I find most of my ideas are not explicitly a logical process. They just pop out somewhere. I’ll wake up in the morning with an idea. Or sometimes I’ll be talking to a client or prospect or another business person. They’ll be telling me the narrative of their story because I’m always working on strategy, system architecture, business kind of problems. And it’ll suddenly pop into my mind what somebody else should be doing. I kind of live in that spot all the time. Ideas bubbling up and then these communications. It’s inspiring to talk to people about their challenges and to give them some inspiration and possible new directions to contemplate.

Business Development: I’m new here and I’ve had to spend a lot of time in Linked-In just reconnecting with a lot of former colleagues. And, in this time where we’re having to Zoom, I get a lot of energy and inspiration from other people. That’s been a little challenging because you have to kind of replace in-person interaction in another way. And I think you can gather a lot of information, but then I go hiking or biking or something just to percolate on a lot of things or even just an easy walk where you are thinking a little bit. It’s nice to do.

Manufacturing Program Manager: I go for a walk or for a bike ride. When I come back, I try to get into a book as opposed to turning on the TV or getting distracted. Any business book – I’ve got a half a dozen I just tend to read and read again. And they always fire up some idea. Of course, ideas are a dime a dozen. You have to grab one and do something with it. So I write them down and in the morning when I’m at work, I try to trigger one or at least do something with one and see where that leads me. And usually it always leads me in a good direction.

Optical Engineer: I find that when I get a new problem to work on, it’s good to just take a little bit of time to familiarize myself with the whole problem, but not necessarily work on it right away. So that it’s in my mind and even without thinking about it, my mind will still work on the problem.

Microfluidics Guru: I’m a little bit of a crazy guy. Usually I get inspiration by knowing that in a small way I could help ease the pain of the sick people and their loved ones. So usually when I go to the hospital and somebody gets out, I’m so happy and I cry. And I keep it moving like, “Well, maybe we have to develop this device for these guys.” Because I’ve been there. So a lot of people are sad, but in a small way we can make them happy by developing new technology, and using our talent and skills to alleviate the pain.

Project Engineer: It’s quite inspiring, especially working with others in StarFish and speaking to clients. Everybody’s got a need to fill: can the requirement make people’s lives better? For me, that’s quite inspiring to see.  The passion, need and want from a lot of people to try and improve medical devices for peoples’ well-being. And then having them come together and work on their common interests to try to achieve that goal.

QA/RA Specialist: Some of the best ideas I’ve come up with have come out of sideways discussions with colleagues. We’ll be discussing one client’s issue and realize, “Oh, if we figured this out, it would help to apply it to this other client’s issue.” I like the sharing of best practices and experiences. I find they’re great for being repurposed. Not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but putting that wheel on a different vehicle, perhaps.

NPI Engineer: Inspirations are kind of a funny thing with me. There was a show in the seventies called Connections by James Burke. He had talked about a lot of inspiration and development isn’t the work of some mad scientist locked in a room somewhere, but it’s people putting together bits and pieces of ideas. It’s drawing inspiration from learning and learning about things. Sometimes disparate concepts can actually come together and if you know A and you know B, then hey, it makes sense to put them together and come up with C. Much of the inspiration that I draw from is like solving a puzzle – learning about lots of different things so that I can apply them to the particular problem at hand.

Administrative Assistant: When I lived in New Brunswick, I’d go on Tuesday nights to a Toastmasters meeting and I’d get all excited about talking to the people and being able to mentor people. In order to come home, I had to take this ferry across the Kennebecasis River. And there would be a wait for the ferry. Just having nothing to do and sitting in my car with the black sky, I’d get all sorts of ideas and I’d always have a little notebook to mark things down.

Another thing I do is to take something from a totally different field and then say, “How can I use this to help me with my problem?” For instance, I was helping a friend who had what people called an impossible task to do. I went and looked at judo and said, “Okay, what in judo can I take and use?” I took how they use their opponent’s strength to defeat them. So I applied that principle to the impossible task and came up with a plan for the problem that was supposed to be an unsolvable sort of thing. And it worked. So taking something totally unrelated and applying it to the problem.

Marketing: Inspiration. I never know when I’m going to get it. I never know how it’s going to come to me. And that’s about it. But if I’m looking for inspiration to a problem – I use the techniques that people have mentioned, which is go take a walk, go talk it out with Ed, go do things that free my mind while leaving a little kernel in there so I think about it.

We hope these ideas help you find inspiration for your work. And we would enjoy hearing your sources of inspiration. Contact us to discuss your medical device inspiration and innovation with a free commercialization consultation.