Cardiovascular Market Research Project

Powered by the belief that the cardiovascular (CV) implant durability evaluation industry has grossly been under-served, I wanted to dig deeper in this market. During my internship with GST's Medical Consulting & Testing Division, in no time, I became the de facto leader of our team of 3 Duke engineering grad students. I delegated responsibilities to organize our internal communications and streamline our accountability in our weekly update meetings.

Studying the underlying trends involved us to research all the major company portfolios and PMA database for the different cardiovascular products like heart valves, stents, and cardiac rhythm management devices (pacemakers, ICDs, CRTs). This gave us a good birds-eye view of the hot development zones in this market.

Another major task of this project was to get a worm's-eye view to capture customer pain points and how they currently carry-out the 3 umbrella tasks in durability evaluations namely identifying boundary conditions, performing computational simulations, and validating through benchtop testing. To get a wholistic feedback, we carefully drafted a survey and reached out to industry professionals in several MedTech companies and testing service providers. The survey followed by informational interviews with some helped us answer industry-wide prevalent questions like -

• First engagement in durability evaluations by small & big companies

• Budget and resource constraints for small & big companies

• Tasks performed in-house vs. farmed out for small & big companies

• Willingness to outsource for small & big companies

• Estimating market size of CV implant durability evaluations

• Quantity of products evaluated and compensation schemes rationale adopted by testing service providers

All these helped us develop business strategies which could be used to acquire customers by addressing these customer pain points.