Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E19 Stuart Grant | MedTech Innovation
Join host Aaron Moncur as he sits down with Dr. Stuart Grant, a seasoned med tech innovator with over 25 years of experience at industry giants like Johnson & Johnson and DePuy. Dr. Grant shares his journey from design engineering to founding his own consultancy, offering invaluable insights into medical device development, regulatory challenges, and the future of medical technology.
Main Topics:
- Career progression in medical device engineering
- Challenges of starting a medical tech consultancy
- Regulatory differences across global markets
- Innovation strategies in medical technology
- Advice for young engineers
- Future trends in surgical robotics and AI
About the guest: Dr. Stuart Grant is a seasoned expert in the MedTech industry with over 20 years of experience at major companies like Johnson & Johnson and DePuy Synthes. In 2023, he founded Archetype MedTech, a consultancy that helps medical device companies achieve market approval through innovation strategy, technical evaluations, and team training. He holds advanced innovation and project management degrees and is a Chartered Engineer with several medical device patents. In addition to his technical work, Stuart lectures on innovation history and is a visual artist. His international experience and multidisciplinary expertise make him a key advisor for MedTech startups and scale-ups.
Links:
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
Exactly How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
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We take the real world and try and abstract it to a test, and we test it and say, Okay, if this relates to the real world in this sort of verifiable way. But sometimes, you know, the human body and the biomechanics are so complicated that the abstraction sometimes doesn't work.
Aaron Moncur:hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today we are joined by Dr Stuart Grant, a seasoned med tech innovator with over 25 years of experience at industry giants like Johnson and Johnson and Depew as the founder of archetype med tech, Stuart now leads a consultancy dedicated to building startups and scale ups through the complex journey of bringing medical devices to market with a PhD in technology and innovation management and a track record of navigating regulatory landscapes across the UK, US and China. Stuart brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to the table. Stuart, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.
Unknown:Hey, I'm in nice to speak to you today. So
Aaron Moncur:what was it that made you originally decide to get into engineering and manufacturing fields? So
Stuart Grant:at school, at high school, I was fairly good at maths and physics, as most engineers have to be, but I also loved art and design, so I was always crafting and drawing and painting. So putting all those, I was trying to think, putting all those sort of disciplines together, I came up with industrial design at the time, or product design here in the UK. So I went and did my math, my bachelor's in product design. After I graduated, I was, didn't really get a product design job. I got a design engineering job. So as we know, cat jockeys working at the time on pro engineer or Unigraphics, modeling various medical devices, primarily hips, knees and shoulders and all the all the intricate instrumentation. So as my career developed, I came moved from design engineering into a project engineer and being a project manager, and just started developing my engineer, my real engineering skills from there, as I was on the job that I applied to the Institute of mechanical engineers here, and got Chuck became a chartered engineer here in the UK, so I was basically becoming a proper, qualified, recognized engineer. So I didn't go direct. I didn't do either a bachelor's or master's in engineering. I sort of went through the experience level from doing engineering for the last 20 years to become an engineer,
Aaron Moncur:which, in my opinion, is the right way to do it. I mean, on the job training is where you really learn about what it's like being an engineer, right? The education, you learn some things, certainly, you get a foundation, but you don't really learn how to be an engineer until you start doing the work. And I've always been of the opinion that the piece of paper is nice to have, but, you know, show me what you can do. That's what really matters. Yeah, you know,
Stuart Grant:when I was starting my career with our lucky enough in the facilities, I work at that a prototype shop, so I was able to do the design work, go and talk to the guys in the prototype shop, get the things made, get the feedback on the design, and start learning a little bit about design, those guys down there, obviously, probably no guys later in their career have a wealth of knowledge to how to actually manufacture these things you're coming up with. So that was a huge help. And nowadays, sometimes the protest hype shop is a bit further away from the design engineering office, but having it next door when I was a kid was really formative.
Aaron Moncur:You know, I feel like our paths were actually quite similar. I did a degree formally in engineering, but I was always really interested in design. I never formally did a degree in industrial design or product design, but that was always kind of what I was more interested in. And started off working for a medical device company, or company engineering company that was engineering services, and our focus was medical devices. We had a prototype shop right right there in the building, and I was out on the mill or the lathe, you know, making prototypes and assembling things and testing things. So I, I feel an affinity already towards you and your your journey. So you work at a few pretty big places, Johnson to Johnson and Depew. And prior to starting your company, archetype med tech, you, I think you were like part of the executive leader. Shep at Johnson, and Johnson, is that right? Probably
Stuart Grant:not. The executive leadership at Johnson, that's quite high up. I was the, my last role. I was leading the MDR program for the Pew joints, so the Recon business. So that was quite a significant role at the time. But I wasn't, obviously the J executives level.
Aaron Moncur:I must have missed, misread that somewhere. My point was that you had a significant role at Johnson, and Johnson, I'm sure things were, were great. That's a big company. I imagine they take care of their employees. And you decided to jump ship and start, start archetype, med, tech. What? What was the impetus for doing that?
Stuart Grant:So throughout my life, my dad, first of all, my dad's in the military. So I moved around a lot. As a kid, though I stayed in the same corporation for 23 years. I actually moved every two or three years within that corporation. Wow. So I started my career here in the UK, in Leeds, I think at 28 I moved to Warsaw Indiana. Spent seven years in Warsaw Indiana, which was absolutely fantastic. Towards the end of that, I was like, What's my next job? Where am I going to go next? Am I going to leave J and J go and find something else. And then another role cropped up in China in setting up the R and D facility in China, which doesn't happen very often, that corporation like J and J says, Okay, we're going to set up a big R D. So I was like, I'm going to apply for that job, and I'm going to hopefully get it. And I did. So another five years I was in China, working in the facility there in Suzhou, teaching young engineers how to develop medical devices. So the engineers in China at the time, back in 2010 were coming from sort of adjacent industries, Black and Decker or DeWalt, ground force pumps, all those sort of mechanical engineering jobs, and they were looking into medical engineering. They were transferring those skills to medical engineering, and we had to teach them the medical engineering part of engineering and develop the products at the same time. Sounds really exciting. Five years now, after China, I moved back here to the UK in 2016 in that point, I was thinking, what am I going to do next with my career? My career? So I'm back in the UK, so I took two options. And the MDR project was just starting, and this was a significant, as you know, significant upheaval for the industry, and I was given the leadership role for the joint side. So big project, lots of people. So I started that for five years, but I also decided probably I need to keep my options open once MDR finishes, it's big project, but it does have an end date, and I've got to go and find another job. So I started my PhD, my doctorate in medical engineering, not medical engineering. So medical innovation. Probably know what my doctorate is in, right? Medical Innovation. So I did that in parallel to do an MDR with the view that probably time MDR finishes, I'll probably move on from j and j if there's no other opportunities that crop up. But I had to keep my options open, and unfortunately, nothing did crop up in j and j so I decided, okay, here's the chance mid 40s, let's go and start my consultancy in medical innovation and product development and see how it goes, and help startups and scale ups develop their devices from all the knowledge I have, and get their product to market approval as quickly as possible, is my my goal now, and
Aaron Moncur:so tell us a little bit about your company. How long has the company existed? Are you the sole employee, or do you have a team? Or do you work with contractors? Obviously, the focus is is medical that's a large industry. Is there a niche focus within that? Yeah,
Stuart Grant:so, so my experience is in orthopedics and surgical devices, so implants and instruments primarily. So that's why I started the scope. There's two people in the company, a business leader who does all the business stuff and myself, who does all the principal consultancy stuff or the engineering. We both lead the business, looking for clients, what, what the business set up to do is I lead the innovations for any startup, and I analyze what they're trying to achieve, what the proof of concept is and what they're trying to get to market proof as quite quickly as possible. So I analyze that innovation process. So do the pieces that have to go together and put a plan, and that plan basically tells the company I'm working with is, okay, this is going to take you 18 months to five years, depending on the complexity. And a million to $5 million to develop this first device, and they hopefully will come back with the cash and say, Okay, let's do it. Stuart, and at that point, I go in contact my wide network of consultants who usually working on their own, and then start contracting them onto the project and building that project team for that company, project team to develop that device. And so the design engineer might be on the project for a year of that five years, medical writing might be at the start and at the end, you know, in making sure that we're not just employing a bunch of people burning a load of cash, where sometimes they've got a load of downtime, the plan is within the networks, syndicate of subject matter experts. We're using them at the right time for the right job, and trying to be as efficient as possible, as quick as possible to get that proof of concept market approval and get it into the market as quickly as possible so these companies don't run out of cash halfway through their development.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, that sounds like a really smart, efficient way to do it, as you have started archetyp archetype in and built yourself as a consultant. What are a few of the biggest challenges you've run into? The Product Development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts providing practical, hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, gdnt, advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer. That's P, D, E, x, p, O, dot engineer.
Stuart Grant:I think so I I've been closeted by a corporation my entire career, so I've been focusing on product development, a bit of budgeting, but as a company, then you've got to start thinking about the taxes, the accounting, the legal aspects that you sort of know happen in the background of a corporation, but you don't really get involved unless you have to sign a piece of paper. Then you get involved a bit more. But this is the part that I'm really starting to understand now is the business side of running a business, not just being the principal consultant or the project leader. That's one thing. The next thing is quite basic, is finding the clients, right? So there's, there's a problem here in the search. Problem is the clients. Obviously, there's never startups. They've got a very small footprint. It might be a surgeon or salesperson with an idea who's done a few design designs and got a prototype. They've got a very small footprint in the market and archetype. We've also got a very small footprint. We don't deal with many clients at a time, three to five, that's maximum we deal with. So matching those two, the needs together, is always a problem. I think a lot of smaller businesses face this problem, and that's why I do podcasts. I do a lot of writing for the industry magazines. I'm on Facebook, not Facebook LinkedIn, to make sure that I'm out there, and you start startups can find me. The other thing is really critical that I've just sort of discovered in the last year is the cash, the money these businesses need, is really critical, and the industry set up around supplying that money. So the angels, VCs and eventually the private equity, if you get that far down the line, is really critical. So what I decided to do was go on an executive education course and financing an entrepreneurial business at London Business School. Just completed it last week to really understand that ecosystem. So I can help my clients with that ecosystem as well when they come to me, because I can tell them how to do the development work and the innovation work, but if they're short on cash, they can't really execute anyway, so we need to help them also find the cash.
Aaron Moncur:What are some of the things that you've learned at this training that if I was a new client coming to you saying, Stuart, I've got this idea for a medical device. How would you advise me when it comes to making sure I have enough cash or where to go to find that? Yeah,
Stuart Grant:so the the. The tutor there, guy called Professor John Mullins. His big point is, customer funded businesses are the best. Try never to go and lend borrow money from a VC or an angel, because they'll take significant equity and the shareholder agreement will be very difficult, especially for a first time founder, to navigate. So his his thesis is trying to get the customer to fund the business. And there's lots of models to do that, which we did talk about. The other key thing is valuing your business. How much is it really worth in young companies, because they don't have much sales, or no sales at all, or not even a product. Valuing that business and figuring out how much equity you should give away to a VC for the millions that you need to develop their medical device is really key. And this course is in London Business School really helped me understand all the gears that the finance people use to value value businesses. So they'll value, obviously, in the low end, and you'll do your calculation to value at the high end. And the negotiation between those two figures is what the final valuation is in the amount of equity you'll you'll get to and the cash you'll get for that equity outside of
Aaron Moncur:the funding which, which obviously is critical, right? Like you mentioned, what are some of the other challenges or roadblocks that you have commonly seen these medical device startups encounter? So
Stuart Grant:one of the really important ones is considering the indications, the clinical indications, that the device is going to be used for. And as engineers and designers, we get really carried away that our product we've come up with can solve the world's issues, and it it might do that. I'm not questioning that, but you can't go and get market approval on solving the world's issues. The regulatory people who have just say, No thanks. It's going to take you loads of clinical studies to prove all that you're going to solve these world issues, and it's going to take way too long. So what startups need to think about is what they're going to go with first, what indication they go with first, and then maybe a very small, narrow clinical indication in a list of loads of Contra indications to start with. And this is, this is called the beachhead strategy. So you get your beachhead military analogy. Once you've got their beachhead, you can start building on that landing zone, and then get more and more indications as you move forward, but to get that first part in the market, just go for one very narrow indication is really key.
Aaron Moncur:And just to clarify, when you say indication, it's basically what the device is intended to do, right the problem or procedure it's intended to perform? Yeah, exactly. Sorry.
Stuart Grant:So in medical engineering, medical development, we've got clinical indication, which will be statement that says exactly what that product is going to treat, the disease state that's going to treat, and then you've got a longer sort of paragraph. It's the the intended use, how it's going to be used. So the indication is really key, and that's what drives the clinical evaluation and the market approval. That one small sentence on your product, it's one of the most important. You've
Aaron Moncur:worked in the med tech areas in the UK, the US and China. How do regulatory environments differ between the countries, or are they pretty similar? So
Stuart Grant:MDD and FDA, QSR, the MDD, the original one, were fairly similar. If you built your design control process around MDD and MDR, you could go to both markets quite easily with the introduction of MDR in 2019 that changed everything. The clinical requirements on MDR are so much more significant than what the FDA are looking for. It is MDR is probably most stringent in the world now to get through, and it is a major difference from FDA. And we know in coming next February, the FDA are going to realign their QSR to ISO, 13485, which is going to be QMs, our quality management system regulation instead, the FDA is calling it, but it's still not going to be anywhere near the MDR regulations. So actually, EU and the US turning to the UK. So when Brexit happened, the UK took all the EU rules and put them into the UK law. Within MDR was one of those, and the thought was back in. Whenever it was. Now everyone forgets 2017, 18, some Lana. It's been so long that these laws will be rewritten to how the UK wanted to happen because of all the COVID and all the other political things that happened in the UK here, it just hasn't happened. So the UK medical device law and the MDR is basically the same at the moment, and there's no real plans that I've heard of to change anything so and and then the China. It's been such a while since I've been in China, it's been nearly nine years. I've not really kept up with the regulations in China, because it changed so often, so I'm not sure what's going on there. So I can't really comment very easily on
Aaron Moncur:that one, a total tangent question, when you moved from the UK to the US, what were some of the cultural surprises or the culture shocks that you experienced? Then do you if you recall?
Stuart Grant:Yeah, I do. And I'll put this in context, right? So I moved from a city, Leeds in the UK, to Warsaw, Indiana. So it's the Midwest population, 15,000 people. And what? How old was I asked? Because, like, 2829 something like that. I was a bit stupid, but young and stupid, and didn't really get the cultural aspects of what where I was going. And I mean, I made quite a few sort of mistakes upset a few people, and definitely did in those times, especially first six months until I got a good friend who's American, and they started telling me what sort of aspects of the especially the Midwest, and one of the small ones was, we don't do this in the UK. But if someone, if you ask somebody through email to do something right, can you send me this document and they send it to you, the assumption is you have to send a thank you back, and I did and I did the US, yeah, okay, and the US, and I didn't. Because I was like, Okay, thanks. You go, I say a hint in my hand, and
Aaron Moncur:then the other party feels offended because hey, didn't even say thank you. Who is this guy?
Stuart Grant:What a jerk. Yeah? I was like, Oh, ouch. So that interesting, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that's super interesting, huh? That's just not a thing. In UK, you get the thing you requested and that's it. No one expects any any exchange beyond that.
Stuart Grant:Not really same. In Switzerland, Germany, the Nordics don't really expect it. If they're going out of their way and you're asking for a huge favor, maybe, yeah, you'll say thank you. But if it's just a sort of daily job type of thing,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, it seems more efficient. That's quicker,
Stuart Grant:yeah? So that was what I can just think of right now. That's probably, that's
Aaron Moncur:a great example. Yeah, that's a great example. Well, let me take a short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Learn more at Team pipeline.us The podcast is also sponsored by the wave in online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more at the wave dot engineer, and today, we are speaking with Stuart Grant. So Stuart thinking back over the myriad of different projects that you've worked on, not just as a consultant for yourself, but But working at various companies over the years, is there one that where you can share an R and D project that you work on, where there was there was a problem, there was some challenge? Of course, every project has challenges, but is there one in particular that stands out where there was a challenge that you and your team needed to overcome. What was the challenge and how did you overcome it? Yeah, so
Stuart Grant:I can't really talk in specifics here, but I can talk in generalities about challenges I've faced, and when it, when initially comes from a product you've you've designed and engineered, it's gone into the market and something's gone wrong. You didn't expect. It's a tough one, right? It's like, what did we do wrong? Why? In during a product development that goes on years and years, you make so many decisions, so many design decisions of every little aspect. And when you're thinking about an instrument set, which this is an example of where you've got 150 instruments sitting in a tray, instrument tray, all the different designs, and all assemble different and some little thing goes wrong. You're like, wow. Why? How did we miss this? What did we do wrong? And we just look back on the paperwork and think. Yeah, well, because we just think it was a minor design, we didn't, we didn't think we need to do as much testing as we thought. We did. The risk assessment we did didn't show that we didn't need to do the testing on that particular function, but to say that what we do, we obviously do a risk assessment to understand what needs to be tested, what's going to fail and what's going to pass. But all our testing is abstractions from the real world, right? We take our tests and we abstract it. We take the real world and try and abstract it to a test, and we test it and say, Okay, if this relates to the real world in this sort of verifiable way. But sometimes, you know, the human body and the biomechanics are so complicated that the abstraction sometimes doesn't work in the real world throws up challenges all the time, like, oh, wow, didn't, didn't realize that happens in engineering, in special medical engineering. So you have to go back and read, redesign your test, redesign the test method for the next time you design it, hopefully you'll catch it. But as we know, engineering design, most things are unique. That's why I'm engineering it. They're new to the world. So every test can never capture every problem that's and you only have a great night time, which is the issue?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, you have lectured on the history of innovation, which seems like a fascinating topic. That's a class I wouldn't mind sitting in on. How does your understanding of the past inform your approach to current? You know challenges in your consultancy and the companies that you work with,
Stuart Grant:yeah, pretty much the way people have designed stuff now thinking about the great engineers and designers of the past. So first one is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who might know the US equivalent is Roebling you designed the Brooklyn Bridge, the wires guy, ours isn't by Kingdom Brunel, but you've got people like Josiah Wedgwood, who developed the first potteries and really understood the chemistry of clays and how to make the different Colors. So he really did a lot of experimentation and relating that to now, the way we do things hasn't really changed. The tools and the frameworks and the processes we apply agile or CAD have changed in eventual technology, fundamental thinking as a human change. Ai changing fundamentally, a lot of things at the moment, we'll have to wait and see. But create human creativity stays the same, and it all comes down to understanding the world. And when I say that, and this is why I study history of innovation, is to be creative, one of the fundamental things human has to have is a huge bank of knowledge. So as an engineer, you have to sort of cram as much knowledge in there as you can, because creativity comes from combination of two disparate things joining together and going, Oh, wow, if I did this. This solves the problem. So having that knowledge base to pull from is really important. And unfortunately, it's just hard graft, reading, watching lots of things on YouTube, observing one of the things I love to do, and it's a bit sad, I guess, is I used to in in the US that you have lows, go around lows and look all the mechanisms and designs and see how others have solved them, or when seers existed, going to the Craftsman section of Sears, that was always an exciting thing to take out for me.
Aaron Moncur:I know exactly what you mean. I am constantly looking at different products and devices and trying to understand how they were designed and how the mechanisms work and things like that. My wife is always rolling her eyes at me, or, you know, thinking I'm silly for the but this is what we do, right as engineers, we find it fascinating how other people have designed something, what looking forward to the actually, I want to go back for a second you mentioned how it's difficult to gather, to accumulate all this knowledge that is required for innovation to occur right within a human brain. Unfortunately, it's not like the matrix where we can just upload a file of the, you know, the past 100 years of design and innovation. Does, does that? Does that infer, then that? Or maybe that's not the right way to ask this. How have Have you seen younger NG. That don't have that bank of knowledge. Are there any pro tips or best practices that you have observed or that you recommend for younger engineers to to climb that hill more quickly? Or is it, is it just a grind and takes you know, years and years and years of observing and learning and studying. So
Stuart Grant:what I because I like the product development process side, a couple of so young engineers. I usually give them two books just kick them off. Is one of them is called, just called product new product development by App Engine Ulrich, which just teaches them what the whole process is. And the other one is bio design, that teaches them the the bio, the biomedical engineering side of innovation, so it helps them get in key and it is just, you know, looking at the trade magazines every month or going to as many conferences as you can and see if you can just build that knowledge. But it is just, I don't know if there's a there's a shortcut of just reading and attending and observing everything that's going on around you to understand the problem. It is just as quickly you can accumulate that knowledge, but you also have to be able to recall it as well. And that's where the creativity part comes in as well, to be able to recall that knowledge. I
Aaron Moncur:remember working with a brand new engineer years ago, and every couple of weeks it seemed like he'd come back and say, Hey, what? What can I do to really accelerate this process and get to like a senior level engineer, you know, much, much faster. And I never felt like I had a great answer for him back then, but I think today, looking back, the way I'd answer it is you just have to spend more time if you want to climb that ladder faster, if you want to accumulate that experience and knowledge faster, spend more time doing your job or not even doing your job, necessarily, but spend more time becoming an engineer, right? Whether it's at work or on your own time for personal projects, just do things related to engineering more often. It just comes down to the number of reps that you can get in, and what time frame can you get those reps in? Right? Spend a couple of hours after work right on your own, reading things and trying things and building things and So, long story short, I agree with you. I think it just it comes down to spending more time, and if you want to cut it off at eight hours a day after work is over, great, that's fine, right? No harm in that, but you're not going to grow as an engineer as fast as someone else is putting in extra hours beyond the minimum. I think I would also say that having mentors is really, really important. I think that is one key that unlocks. I don't know about acceleration, but it's not going to slow you down anyway. Not having those mentors to turn to, I think, can be an impediment to growing as an engineer.
Stuart Grant:That's a great point. I just add to that. So I'm a mentor for some college kids doing engineering, but I'm also also be, also have mentors, so both ways, so people teaching me how to be a better leader and consultant, and then I translate what I've learned back down the lad. And I think we all should try and do that all the way up to to the end of, you know, our careers or and past. A couple couple of my mentors are, were in the 70s, and they were like, Well, why didn't you go and try that? Stewart? I'm like, Okay, I'll go and try that. Was a good idea. Didn't take a fab it's some basics. Just the now, an engineer coming out of college doesn't know how, doesn't quite write a CV very well, or a cover letter, or needs, needs to do a dummy interview, and you can help them do that. Those sort of things are so important. So the basics, if you remember back when you were younger, thinking, shit, I need a job, well, I'm gonna go and find a job. If somebody was there just to say, my, you know, my dad was in the military. He had no real experience of getting a university degree and going getting a profession. He was he joined the military at 16 years old. He was there for 26 years. So, you know, he but that's why you need mentors sometimes, is the people to fill in those gaps, and they've always helped me through my career.
Aaron Moncur:I'm going to go back to something you said earlier during this conversation. You mentioned, I think it was when you were at J and J and you were you're finishing up on a big project for them and thinking about what's next. What am I going to do after this? Nothing really popped up at j and j, so you decided to go. Off on your own. You said something to the effect of, if I don't find something here, I'm going to have to go look for another job. I think a lot of engineers that would be a terrifying prospect. I have to go look for another job. I don't want to go look for another job. I'm happy, I'm safe, I'm comfortable here. Yet it seemed like you had this overwhelming confidence that it's not that big a deal. I'm just going to go find something else where. Where did that confidence come? Do you think
Stuart Grant:confidence? I'm not sure I thought I was thinking I talked to my wife at the time. You know, it was three or four years ago, if we don't do it now in my mid 40s, I will stay in a corporation till I'm 65 right for the next 20 years. So what do I want to do in looking at the leaders before me in their where their careers went after, like 50s? I was like, do I want to do that? I don't want to go into details, you know, I do. I want to be that person. I was like, let's go and try this. I've got, I've got a bit of savings behind me to do it for a couple of years to see how it goes. If not, I can always probably go and get another corporate medical engineering leadership role somewhere they in medical medical engineers, such a small field, I even go back into corporate or go into more of a consult contracting role in medical engineering, doing projects, six bunch of projects, or one year projects at a time as a contractor, which works as well. So there was many ops. I knew there was many options, if just this doesn't work for me to pursue after this anyway, so it was like, it's a risk, but the risk is medium. Let's say
Aaron Moncur:that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you had enough money saved up. So if it didn't work out, you had a year or two to fund yourself, and then they're always going to be opportunities for a person with your skill set. And
Stuart Grant:that's why you've got to keep educating yourself and learning through your career, right? Because you've got to have that skill set is still applicable today. Yeah, yep.
Aaron Moncur:What are some of the trends that you're looking forward to in med tech, medical device engineering, what? What do you think is going to be the next big thing, 345, years from now?
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Stuart Grant:Yeah, so obviously, the big things now is AI and robotics. I saw a stat last I think it was 150 robotics companies, surgical robotics, that companies started last year in all different aspects of the body, so high tissue and soft tissue, so they could obviously go through a level of consolidation over the next 12 months, 24 months, and find out who wins. AI is going to get more and more into particularly imaging. Is doing a lot of imaging of CT and MRI scans to find various tumors. But that's going to go more into surgical imaging, those surgical structures, using AI to help doing that, which is probably going to be really important. So that's going to be like a platform technology. I think so companies will build a imaging platform technology that then will be put into a surgical robot. But might also be a platform technology. When I say platform, the iPhone is a platform that's used with apps, right? So then an end, company will then create a indication specific robot based on all those different platforms that other companies have developed, which will be exciting. At the moment, it's very what's the word? It's very top down. So company develops the robot, the software, everything that goes into that capital piece that goes into the or, I think it'd be more modular as we move forward. Oh,
Aaron Moncur:that's very interesting, huh? Yeah, right now, I don't pretend to know this landscape as well as others out there who are more. Experts in this field. But as far as surgical robotics, it seems to me like Intuitive Surgical is way ahead of everyone else. And in recent years, some of the other strategics, like striker and Medtronic and J and J have been developing their own surgical robots. Do you think that? I mean, does anyone get a catch intuitive, you mentioned 150 robotics companies started up last year. Is that? Is that a race not worth racing? Or do you think that there are some some companies that are going to catch up to them?
Stuart Grant:I guess they'll have to develop something really specific, the intuitive on addressing at the moment. So, yeah, think about the da Vinci. Da Vinci was created 30 years ago. It said to version five or six at the moment. I can't remember which one. So that's they've developed a robot every five years or so, and increase those indications for the beachhead thing. The first version only did something very basic, but as that five versions have come along, they've increased the capabilities of that thing over 25 years. It's a long time, right? Yeah. So yeah, got CMR here in the UK, sort of trying to compete with them. Intuitive. But, yeah, I think on the heart tissue side, there will probably be two or three robots. There may be on J and J or striker or Zb. There might be somebody else that all these companies, these implant companies, actually use to do implant their products. At the moment, it's all bespoke. It's all virtually vertically integrated designs. Maybe that might change the other thing, VR, you know, ar, VR, XR, hollow lanes is being discontinued. So has apple vision been discontinued? At the moment, we've only got the meta, whatever device now, and the hive and a few other Magic Leap I'm not sure that there's much more legs in VR at the moment. I think people have got a bit tired of it, maybe like 3d screens that we had 10 years ago. It's just not doing what is said it's going to do. So maybe the current incarnation of those devices might sort of fade away, and in five or 10 years, a totally new type of VR system will come along.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I could see that. I remember, I don't remember who the companies were, but I remember tablets were a thing before Apple came out with their iPad, but they never really caught on, and they it wasn't a market that was growing, and it kind of seemed like they just went away, and then Apple came out with the iPad, and all of a sudden, oh, I've got to have an iPad. I've got to have a tablet. And now they're ubiquitous. So I wonder, you know how that will repeat itself for XR we shall see. Yeah, I'm
Stuart Grant:not sure if this anecdotal, but the use of iPads is decreasing a little bit at the moment as well, from a professional perspective, mostly gaming on your iPad now or watching movies, it's not as a professional device. I think they hoped it to be, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, yeah. I just use my laptop. Well, if I was a young engineer interested in getting into surgical robotics, and I was asking you for advice. What kind of advice would you give me?
Stuart Grant:I don't know what advice surgical robotics. It's not really my area of real expertise. There's, I guess, as a young engineer, you've got a lot of time to see the robotics industry develop. So go and find a local surgical robotics company and join them, knowing, though they might not be the winners in the race, but you'll learn a lot. And that's the thing about when companies fail, the companies fail, but the people don't. The people go on to do other things, other great stuff. So go and find a local robotics company. They'll employ you, pay you, hopefully pay you as well, and learn something and then just discover the market that way.
Aaron Moncur:That's wonderful. Doing is better than learning about doing well. Stuart, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your precious time and wisdom and insights with us. We've hit on a lot of things. Is there anything else that we should talk about? Any other questions we should explore that we haven't talked about yet? I
Stuart Grant:think one of the one of the questions you. You usually ask is about the speed of speed of engineering, and how you get faster than that. And I just would like to say that moving my whole business is now is moved to the cloud. Right now. I don't have the incumbents of a corporate IT system that has to walk under I just made sure I went out and got the SAS products that really helped my business moving. And I know before in December, you talked to John Hirsch, on on design. After that, I went made sure I'd got a got a license for on design, not on design, onshape, sorry, on design or something else on shape, because that is a great tool in encouraging some of the CAD people I work with who are solid works fanatics to try on shape, because it works so much easier in this in this environment where we're all working from home in different offices and all sorts over the place. So
Aaron Moncur:yeah, I think it's the future. Yeah, I think onshape, they've done such a great job. And, you know, SolidWorks is very much still the incumbent, and they're going to be hard to dethrone, just because they're everywhere. But I think it's going to happen. And I we don't use onshape at the office, so this is not a paid plug for onshape or anything like that. But we use it at our we have a little volunteer program called CAD Club, where we teach kids how to use CAD, and we use, we use on shape there, because it's so much easier to get into. You know, you can run it on. These kids just have crummy public school issued laptops, right? They're not work stations by any means, and it works great. Onshape works great. There's nothing to install. They can collaborate online on the same design at the same time. It's just like a, you know, working on a Word document, two people working on the same word document in different places at the same time, same thing. So really an incredible platform. And I think five to 10 years from now, I don't know, SolidWorks,
Stuart Grant:John is an amazing guy. He's a legend as well. He
Aaron Moncur:is. He is, yeah, yep, a legend. I mean, it's incredible, right? The same guy started SolidWorks, which just has defined CAD in our generation for the industry. And now he's invented on shape, and that, I think, is going to, my opinion, just my opinion, going to dethrone SolidWorks over the next five to 10 years. So he's literally brought, probably, I don't know, 60, 70% of the CAD to the industry over this 3040, year period, amazing. Yeah, I
Stuart Grant:think my last comment about, you know, learning is, yeah, I'm dyslexic. I hate reading. It's but I have to, and I have to force myself to read a book, leads to one a month. I tried to do more than one a month, but one a month is my target, and I can remember the first book I read. And I didn't read a proper book until I was 23 cover to cover, because I was trying to, always, as engineers or designers, always trying to avoid reading. But I forced I read this first book. It was called longitude by dava Sobel, and it got me into reading. It was a science book, and that's where it took me down reading about science and innovation and engineering and just pursuing that whole idea. But as as engineers, we hate reading. So one of the things you got to do, unfortunately, is read a lot to get that knowledge base of what's going on out there
Aaron Moncur:any on that subject, any great book recommendations that you can share, specifically some that might be interesting to the, you know, the engineering audience here, science fiction or something like that.
Stuart Grant:I'm just looking over to my bookshelf because I was a so one of the really great books is called the Idea Factory. It's about Bell Labs from the 1940s to the probably the 1980s with Claude, Shannon itch, Shannon, the guys who invented the transistor in there, Shannon Shockley, and can't remember the third guy who won the Nobel Prize, but it was all about how Bell Labs in Jersey was developed all the engineers and scientists there. It's really, really good book, just looking at the author, John gerdner,
Aaron Moncur:terrific. All right, I haven't read that one that sounds fascinating. Well, Stuart, thank you so much again for being with us today. Really appreciate it. This is a fascinating conversation, and I think a lot of a lot of people are really going to benefit from and appreciate all of this. So thank you again. So much.
Stuart Grant:Hi. You're welcome, Aaron. It's great chat today.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you like what you heard today, please. Us share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and r&d services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot engineer, thank you for listening. You.
