University of Michigan's Innovation Center team from top left: Alex Kim, Elyse Kemmerer, Adrienne Harris, Steve White, Merrell Sami, Brenda Jones, and Jim Geiger.

Students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are being provided with the opportunity to know what it’s like to work for a medical start-up company. An article in Health Michigan magazine describes how.

“We’re creating a new generation of entrepreneurs around medical innovation," said James Geiger, cofounder of the university’s Medical Innovation Center (MIC), now in its second year. 

The MIC awarded five fellowships to form the core team that works with Geiger. Together they developed 50 teaching modules, with assistance from faculty in biomedical and health-related research and education.

"We try to think of any possible connection and include as many people as we can to create a big web across the university," said Brenda Jones, managing director.

That web includes building databases and using social networking to break institutional barriers to communication.

Geiger and his five fellows are working on developing a device for securing catheters. Currently, catheters are secured using extensive amounts of tape or sutures then tape, resulting in discomfort and hygiene challenges.

This effort reflects the fellows’ charge: to identify opportunities that can lead to new devices for improving a specific aspect of surgery. To do that, they're exploring all aspects of surgery, from watching 12-hour procedures to interviewing everyone associated with how it happens. Then they bring their observations into brainstorming sessions and follow the path to innovation laid out by Geiger and his U-M associates. "We're giving them a sense of what it's like to work in a startup company," says Jones.

The MIC team spends much of its time in hospitals, but it also has space at a local office park.  Geiger envisions MIC becoming a hub for community-wide innovation as the program grows.

"I want this to be the one common place where people come together around health innovation," Geiger says.