"We have a lot of smart people out there making all kinds of products and saying, 'look what I made, go sell it'. There wasn't enough of 'is this what the customer wants?'”
Grady Davis,
Senior Global Marketing Director at Medtronic's Spines & Biologicals division.
This challenge might sound familiar to many innovation leaders. Despite being the world's largest standalone medical technology company, Medtronic faced a common struggle: building products without first validating customer needs.
The challenge
The Spines & Biologicals division needed to transform how they approached product development. Like many established R&D driven companies, they had fallen into the trap of building products first and assuming customer value later. In an industry centered on delivering quantifiable value to the healthcare system, this approach was no longer sustainable.
"If we keep doing the exact same things, you're ignoring the reality of the business. We have to do something different, take the chance, and something's got to change," Davis explains.
The journey
Davis and his team embarked on a transformation journey to reshape how they thought about customer value. The approach combined self-paced learning with practical application:
- A four-week online course where cross-functional team members from sales, marketing, and engineering completed focused 30-minute modules on their own schedule
- A series of collaborative workshops that brought actual surgeons—their customers—into the innovation process
The structured approach to customer collaboration proved transformative. "We collaborate all the time, but the structure we did this time made it very different," Davis reflects. "A lot of it was 'We're going to build something', instead of going all the way back and asking 'Why are you doing that job in the first place? What problem are we trying to solve for our customers?'"
