Learning from mistakes allows your company to successfully see your product to market. Learning from mistakes, yours and others, remains an essential component to successful completion of the commercialization process. Your end goal is to bring your lifesaving device to market impacting countless lives. You want to bring your life saving device to market. Period. However, the steps through to market remain complex. Complexity requires navigation, skill, taking your time, and learning from mistakes.
A Growth Mindset
As school children growing up, mistakes are graded as incorrect answers. As such, mistakes feel wrong and messy, yet not so with a growth mindset. Mistakes are opportunities for learning. When a mistake is handled gracefully and with purpose, it is a valuable learning experience. Learning from those mistakes grows individuals and companies. That’s a growth mindset.
Mistakes happen. Failure also happens. An essential component of any business is failure. FAIL can mean: First Attempt In Learning. Scientists, entrepreneurs, and educators know that mistakes aren’t mistakes, just experiments. When something goes wrong on a project, validation, or sales campaign fails, then it’s an opportunity to learn from the failure inspecting what went wrong, and making corrections. In short, learning from mistakes, creates grit and a gritty culture.
Learn from Other’s Mistakes
However, not learning from mistakes and repeating them leads to failure—and insanity. A short cut to avoid countless headaches is to learn from other people’s mistakes. Inarguably, thousands of medical devices have successfully been through the commercialization process. Those companies and career professionals have paved the way for you. Heed their advice. The number 1 mistake Medical startups make according to the experts? Rushing.
Rushing through the process causes unnecessary mistakes. Making crucial mistakes in the design or manufacturing process costs more time—and money—correcting those mistakes. As such, rushing wastes time instead of saving it. Instead, allow your quality management system to help create a sound strategy that will deliver well-functioning devices en masse.
Such effective quality management does require more time on the front end. But once established, a smooth running system is in place and helps on the back end, during scaling up and full commercialization. There’s a smart, short term wait that supports and delivers the long term goals.
Final Words
In short, learning from your mistakes enables you to see your vision to completion allowing you to get your essential medical device to market. You will make mistakes, learn from them. The medical device industry continues to grow in importance and value through innovative and life saving devices. Slow down, experiment, and embrace a growth mindset. Trust the experts in the regulatory and quality field to show you the way. Make them part of your team. They’ll see your product through to commercialization.
Let MAE Group help. We offer a full suite of services including regulatory, quality system services, and project management.
