Company Overview
Our Mission
Our mission is to enhance strategic R&D practices for medical technology, especially for drug delivery and combination products, by synthesizing a new approach to technology stewardship that is fundamentally informed by modern biopharma portfolio and asset management practices.
Prior Work
Medical Innovation Partners has existed in one form or another since 2022. We have consulted to startups at The Engine, to MIT labs, and to many founders in research institutions trying to figure out their first indication and drive value. We have also applied these principles and tools to independently scout technologies and opportunities to advance the standard of care, as a “funnel” for independent entrepreneurship activities.
Leadership
Dan Richards has over 15 years of experience in R&D, more than 10 of which have been steering medical technologies from concept to clinic. He also received a Master of Science in Engineering & Management from MIT in 2024, having conducted his thesis with Dr. Brandon Westover who is a Harvard Associate Professor of Neurology and preeminent researcher of clinical decision modeling, as well as Professor Michael Cima who heads a lab at MIT and is responsible for early R&D strategy for an emerging medical technology.
Having seen the power of these ‘systems’ methodologies to prevent waste first-hand, Dan’s mission is to “pay it forward” to the next generation of inventors and biomedical engineering leaders who want to do great work that is deeply connected to a compelling mission.
Philosophy
Uncertainty as a Value Driver
At the heart of our work is the awareness of how uncertainty drives value in medical technology projects. As uncertainty is reduced – for example, through prototypes, clinical trials, and regulatory milestones – project valuation increases. Learning may lead to important no-go decisions, too. Either way, burning down uncertainty is a driver of value.
Our modeling process and strategic decision-making experience are centered around managing uncertainty, especially the extreme uncertainty that comes with medical technology.
Foundations of the Value Dashboard™
At the core of our approach is a recognition of the great work that precedes us. Effectively, a Value Dashboard is a simple combination of otherwise disparate modeling practices. For example, multi-attribute tradespace exploration (MATE) and clinical cost-effectiveness modeling are both used to visualize relative performance, tradeoffs, and uncertainties of different options. The expertise and epistemologies involved in each, however, are very different. When these two epistemologies are combined, new opportunities emerge, like the opportunity to view medical technology positioning insights far earlier than ever before, and new derivative metrics and insights that weren’t available before. But every project is different, and half the fun is finding useful ways to interpret the model outputs.
Why Model-Based Decision Analysis?
In Expert Political Judgement, Philip Tetlock describes the difference between “foxes” and “hedgehogs”. Hedgehogs may have deep expertise in a particular context, whereas foxes have been experts (hedgehogs) in a few different contexts. It turns out, foxes outperform hedgehogs.
This is intuitively grasped in George Box’s, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Models don’t remove risk and uncertainty, but they absolutely give you the building blocks to make great decisions.
A Value Dashboard doesn’t tell you which decision to make. But it can show you want you from a fresh perspective, what questions to ask, and where to go next.