Accelerating the path
to market
BAXTER
Building a robust maturation process
Baxter is a leading global MedTech company, headquartered in the U.S., with the mission of saving and sustaining lives. Their products are sold in 100+ countries and they have revenues of $12B+.
The challenge
We started working with Baxter in Belgium. They wanted to leverage existing ideas and accelerate their path to market. After the first successful pilot in Belgium, Baxter wanted to replicate the success globally. The new challenge was to allow teams with members that are not co-located to have access to professional coaching to mature their ideas and accelerate their path to market.
Our collaboration with Baxter
Our first partnership involved designing an offline maturation process, named “Bax2theFuture”, deployed in Belgium. We tailored our maturation methodology to coach project teams to move (i) from idea to concept, then (ii) from concept to a business case, and finally (iii) from business case to proposal, seeking funding from Baxter.
During this process, dr. Ping Huang (director of R&D and innovation in Round Lake, IL) visited the process and concluded that the methodology and approach piloted in Belgium would be very useful for innovation teams in the U.S. and beyond. We thereby co-designed an “online maturation process”, which could bring together participants from around the world. In the online process, participants followed a series of four webinars and then scheduled one-on-one calls with MTI²’s coaches, with the goal being to quickly be ready to pitch the idea to management in one of management’s regular innovation meetings.
Long lasting impact
Only in its first edition, more than 25 innovation teams received online coaching and support. The feedback was extremely positive with one-third of the ideas having received the green light to proceed to the market validation phase. Many ideas were also taken back to the Business Units and several others accelerated into go-to-market projects to launch new products. The process also left a long-lasting impact on the teams and ideators who acquired a new way of ideating and assessing the value of their ideas (based on design thinking principles, such as the trichotomy of customer desirability, technological feasibility, and business viability). Finally, our approach was integrated into the online BaxLight stage-gate-funnel tool, making it a sustainable, ongoing approach inside the company.
Why MTI²?
Baxter worked with us due to our (i) experience in building robust processes to accelerate ideas and build compelling project pitches, (ii) our expert facilitators that support their people, and (iii) our expertise in the life science industry.
"I could see MTI²’s guidance reflected in the teams’ pitches. The quality of ideas was very high, and that’s precisely where I think they benefited from the coaching on a phased approach to market in a short time. And coaching by MTI² is much more than just coaching the pitch. In many cases our R&D idea teams don’t have skills in assessing business viability, and your help with validation certainly adds value."
Ping Huang, Director R&D Innovation Strategy & Plan
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