“We have a very rigorous process,” Frank says. “We refer to it as our portfolio management process, where we spend a great deal of time as leaders vetting those opportunities, and understanding where they are in their maturity phase and where the customer or the environment that it will go into is.”
The market must be ready, which means considering the regulatory and compliance landscape, as well as the skill level of the target audience, to assess the timing, Frank says.
Adapt to the market
A key piece of innovation is knowing your market. Health care is changing drastically. The industry is moving patients to lower-cost care settings. The overall population is aging. Digitization, such as wearables that tell you how you slept last night, is increasing. And people want to be more involved in their health care.
All this means that instead of just making devices and therapies that are supplied and supported by physicians, Sleep and Respiratory Care is shifting toward consumer-targeted solutions with digital services that guide them to better care. For example, it debuted a smart sleep snore band at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, which recognizes snoring and gently vibrates to turn that person on their side. But that’s not its first foray into consumer-focused technologies; Philips has previous experience with products such as the Sonicare toothbrush.
