Introduction In order to foster innovation of medical devices within the healthcare sector, a collaboration project, PUSH, has been initiated including the hospitals managed by the Stockholm County Council. The collaboration aims to capture ideas from employees and turn them into so called “high-practice” products as well as facilitate the possibilities for medical device companies to try out their products in the settings of healthcare. Collaborations for innovation, comparable to the PUSH project, can be found in both Swedish and foreign regions, but some of them fail to survive due to obstacles affecting the progress of each collaboration. Avoiding the same destiny will be a challenge to the PUSH project.

Purpose The purpose is to search for factors affecting organizational collaboration concerning innovation systems for medical device development. The study is focusing on ”high-practice” products within the PUSH project.

Theoretical approach In order to emphasize factors affecting innovation, theories regarding innovation systems, clusters and networks has been studied hence they  all concern organizational collaboration.

Method The study’s qualitative approach is based on a semi deductive method. The analysis derives from a deductive outlook consistent with chosen theories, whereas collected data is used inductively to stress and enlarge part of the theoretical framework. Semi structured interviews, earlier research and evaluations constitutes most of the collected data.

Results and analysis Experience from collaborations for innovation shows that some affecting factors can’t be influenced by collaborators, as political decisions and medical device directives. Collaborators can however affect circumstances such as connections and networking, which is significant to manage the innovation process; from idea to commercialization. An explicit focus on commercialization is important to the collaboration project’s surviving opportunities. A central cause why innovation projects don’t last is lack of funding, both for commercializing certain products as well as for retaining and developing existing innovation structures.

Conclusion Collaborating projects should utilize existing structures and complement their networks to involve extensive competency. Decision makers need to decide whether innovation ventures shall be part of the County Council’s assignment. To fulfil the visions of the collaboration project, a policy common to all participants in the forthcoming innovation project needs to be stated, regarding ownership relations, risk sharing, funding and sharing of profits.

The purpose is to study the demand for a testbed for telemedicine and to analyze the medical device-developing companies’ requirements on the testbed’s facilities when collaborating with the healthcare sector in their product development. The study’s aim is to result in a commercialization plan for Karolinska Testbed for telemedicine and eHealth, at the department of Biomedical Engineering at Karolinska University Hospital. During the study, 19 interviews and 6 telephone-interviews has been held with people from the medical device industry, hospitals, potential funders and collaboration structures which foster medical device development. A web-survey has been sent to 279 companies within the fields of medical technologies, IT and telecom, to quantify the results from the interviews.

The study describes how the clinical research on medical technologies has changed over the last decades and what the situation is like today. Present and forthcoming challenges to the Swedish health care system is presented, like demographic changes, increasing healthcare-costs, expensive treatments and the scarcity of medical device innovations being commercialized. Obstacles affecting the medical device development are studied, including the regulatory differences between IT and medical devices. An analysis of the research on product and service development is also looked at from the perspectives on how the medical device companies develop their products, which is derived from both interviews and the web-survey.

The result shows that medical device companies rely upon the ability to collaborate with the hospitals in different phases of their product development process and that there is an extensive need for a testbed structure amongst companies. The companies that collaborate with hospitals do it primarily because it makes their products more adaptive to functioning in the settings of healthcare, time to market and development costs can be decreased and it facilitates the process when validating the functionality of their products. Several companies have their ways of collaborating with hospital wards whilst others explicitly lack indispensable collaboration structures. The study has identified some companies which have shown interest in collaborating with Testbed Karolinska for telemedicine and eHealth and other ones whom wish to receive more information on what the testbed can offer them. In the commercialization plan it is suggested that Karolinska Testbed for telemedicine and eHealth shall focus on their niche and elaborate the competency which the companies doesn’t have. It is also suggested that the Testbed continues the work with developing the internal organization within Karolinska to enable efficient, flexible and qualitative collaboration between companies and the clinics at Karolinska University Hospital.

Svenska medicintekniska företag kan inte konkurrera med de globala företagen med stordrift och låga priser, de måste därför anpassa sina produkter efter de specifika behoven i den svenska vården.

Syftet med studien är att analysera och utvärdera svenska medicintekniska företags marknadsföringsstrategier med avseende på sambandet mellan samarbetsformer och produkters anpassning till specifika behov.