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| Stryker CEO Kevin Lobo says the company is adapting to changes in the industry--courtesy of Stryker |
Kevin Lobo took the tob job at Stryker ($SYK) last month, and he said the devicemaker is changing how it approaches innovation, focusing on payers, patients and customers, not just individual products.
Lobo spoke at Monday's Cleveland Clinic's Medical Innovation Summit, his first public appearance since the promotion, MedCity News reports. The landscape for Stryker has changed over the past few years, and the company is adapting to the increasing need for both clinical and economic evidence to support products, Lobo said.
"We have health economists on our innovation teams now saying, 'So if you add this, who's going to pay for this?'" Lobo said. "That wasn't even a thought 5 or 6 years ago."
Stryker has added IT staff, supply chain experts and economists to its groups of R&D engineers, Lobo said. The increase in internal collaboration is designed to get Stryker's R&D workers to consider the whole continuum of care when developing new technologies, he said.
Lobo also plans to expand the company's emerging markets presence, MedCity News reports, which at the moment only accounts for 6% of Stryker's sales. That could mean more M&A work, something Stryker has hardly been skittish about of late. Earlier this month, Stryker picked up Israel's Surpass Medical for $135 million, snagging that company's CE marked brain aneurysm device. More deals like that--grabbing companies with loads of clinical evidence to support their products--may be in store for Stryker, Lobo said.
- read the MedCity News story