Startup Innovation: When the Ink Hits the Whiteboard

By Brad & Menée Hill

It’s where pure imagination molds into medtech design concepts and startup action plans; where dreams begin that circuitous path to fruition.

We’ve all heard the stories… billion dollar companies that started on a garage workbench or as a crude idea scribbled on a the back of an envelop or a napkin at a bar. That’s how it starts.

But then, we take it further. It becomes a moonlighting job. We bookend our day jobs, with meetings where we strategize, design, measure, reconfigure. We discuss, re-discuss, sit quietly, and sometimes cuss.

It’s all up there on the whiteboard: scribbles, numbers, timelines, names, design iterations, lists of things to do. In the end, we photograph, then erase… leaving the whiteboard clean again, for the next flurry of activity. Between our meetings, ideas ruminate and converge, mixing and mashing, in the subconscious, preparing to play out again, like a new movement in a never ending ensemble of biotech jazz.