Note from the Editor

“Nobody, including myself, would dispute that the medtech industry is a bastion of strength compared with other industry sectors in the current state of economic turmoil,” writes Joerg Kruetten, Executive Vice President at management consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners. It won’t come as a surprise that there is a big but hanging in the contrails of that sentence: “The commercial climate for established medical technology companies is, however, deteriorating. In order to remain successful in the European marketplace, established players will have to adapt their way of doing business in the future.”

Those comments are lifted from an article posted on the Eucomed blog site by Kruetten, who heads Simon-Kucher & Partners’ global medtech competence centre. The insights were inspired by a reading of the MedTech Barometer 2011, a survey commissioned by his consultancy that quizzed 70 medtech professionals on the trends and challenges faced by industry. I can’t say that Kruetten’s observations are ground-breaking, and that is perhaps the greatest cause for concern.

Among financial and business analysts, a consensus has formed around the idea that, unless the medical technology ecosystem undergoes significant change, the traditional role of companies in Europe and the United States as engines of innovation will slowly but steadily erode. The MedTech Barometer 2011 joins the Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard published earlier this year by PwC in prescribing a thorough overhaul of the western medtech model if industry is to avoid a slow slide into irrelevance.

What can be done? Kruetter lists a number of action items in his blog post, but none matter more, to my mind, than fostering innovation at a regional, national and European level and demonstrating unequivocally its economic and social value. That will be one of the primary discussion points at the Eucomed MedTech Forum in October, and I look forward to that exchange. What speakers must—and I’m sure will—convey at the event is a sense of urgency.

According to PwC, China will reach near parity in innovative capacity with the developed nations of Europe by 2020. That is a remarkable accomplishment, but it would be tragic if it were a corollary to the decline of medtech innovation in Europe and the United States. For that reason and many others, industry cannot afford to stop thinking about the challenges of tomorrow.

So, we have a lot to talk about. See you at the Eucomed MedTech Forum in Brussels.