It's always a challenge to move technology out of the lab and into the marketplace, particularly for medical devices. And the challenge has only increased in the last decade. Federal funding for healthcare R&D has more than doubled during this period to the point that it is second only to defense R&D and greater than all non-defense spending combined. The result is a corresponding doubling of medical patents, but, at best only a modest increase in deployment of new medical-device technologies. For example, FDA PMA and 510K applications have been fairly steady over this same period. So there's a lot of knowledge sitting in universities and hospitals that is not reaching its potential market. To make things worse, research output tends to have a short shelf life. It seems we are losing the ability to create value from the tremendous investments our society has made. This will threaten our ability to generate new lifesaving technologies as funds, resources, and people move to more productive areas.

We refer to this growing problem as the “Innovation Gap.” On one side, academic researchers aren't taking ideas as far as they once did. And on the other side, companies are not accepting ideas as early as they were before.

Changes in the capital market partly explain this disconnect. Finding money for seed-stage ideas is extremely difficult. Early-stage funding of venture capital-backed medical companies has dropped significantly. Previously, entrepreneurs and small companies could hope to strike it rich. Now they find they have to give away the store before they even open it, and prospects for financial returns are limited.

Generally, academics doing the research aren't really interested in becoming entrepreneurs. Many wonder why they should put themselves through the pain and agony of dealing with money and venture capitalists when they can do what they trained for: research in a funded environment.

Many companies can no longer absorb partially formed technologies developed at universities. Because of their bottom-line focus, they have cut back substantially on anything that won't improve business in the short-term. As a result, investments in long-term R&D have been dramatically reduced in favor of investments in product-line extensions or acquisitions.

How do we close the Innovation Gap? One solution may be the Innovation Carrier model. It lets universities, hospitals, and companies focus on core missions, while synchronizing the flow of ideas. The idea requires a new type of organization, not an “R&D,” “consulting,” “multi-center initiative,” or “VC” organization.

Innovation Carriers focus on implementing and blending intellectual property from all sources, rather than partitioning ownership and advocating a single technology. The carriers create labs staffed with hands-on people who collaborate across technical disciplines and organizations. When used properly, they reduce costs and reduce the time needed to prove that a body of research is usable. They refine a product so that a company can be comfortable making it. They pull ideas from many sources, and are driven by a product's commercial success.

Historically the heroes of development were entrepreneurs, or brilliant inventors. And while they are still critical, the real heroes should be these who work night and day to make ideas work. There is no shortage of great ideas. But there is a critical shortage of people who have the skills to show that an idea is practical and will work in the marketplace.

Take a look at the number of incubators, and technology-transfer offices going up, the tremendous amount of time and money spent trying to turn academics into entrepreneurs. Why not spend some of that energy and money in organizations who navigate the gap by investing in people, infrastructure, supporting technologies, and focusing on results? We should demand more results in the marketplace from the $30 billion our federal government spends on healthcare technologies.

Tiax is a collaborative R&D company formed from Arthur D. Little's Technology & Innovation business. The company helps clients accelerate innovation by linking laboratories to markets.