FORT WAYNE – Stephen Fening wasn’t content to heal one person at a time.
So the orthopedic devices director at Austen BioInnovation Institute in Akron, Ohio, has devoted his career to engineering products that help hundreds of surgeons improve thousands of patients’ lives every year.
Fening will lead a seminar on the topic of orthopedic innovation at this week’s Orthopedic Design & Technology Forum Supplier Expo. More than 70 exhibitors have registered for the expo at Grand Wayne Center.
About 400 are expected to attend, according to organizer Christopher Delporte, editorial director for Orthopedic Design & Technology, a New Jersey-based trade magazine with about 7,500 subscribers. Last year’s expo saw similar attendance.
The event, one of several annual gatherings in the industry, is unique because it bridges the gap between orthopedic device manufacturers and their suppliers, Delporte said. Other conferences might focus specifically on surgical techniques or engineering design.
This expo is pure manufacturing, he said.
Fening might disagree, preferring to focus on pure innovation. Companies can force the process of engineering new ideas rather than sitting back and waiting for them to appear, he said.
Fening tries to devote one day a week to observing orthopedic surgeries. He notices, for example, when a young surgeon has trouble translating what he sees in a two-dimensional X-ray to the three-dimensional reality of a hip socket.
His goal is to discover surgeons’ and patients’ needs and try to address them.
Answers to problems rarely come in a flash of insight, he said. Typically, trial and error leads innovators to the best solution for a problem. As an example, he said, one inventor needed 17 attempts before finding the best way to tighten wires in total hip replacement products.
Medical device innovation varies from some other industries because products are regulated by the federal government, Fening said.
The length and cost of the approval process affects executives’ decisions on which products to pursue, he said.
Radical advances often come from small startup companies, which can afford to be more daring. And the industry’s major competitors – including Warsaw-based Biomet Inc., Zimmer Holdings Inc. and DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. – can afford to acquire upstart innovators, Fening said.
But that approach is almost all they openly agree on. Getting this group of industry leaders talking about innovation can be sensitive and risky, Delporte said.
“Is somebody from DePuy going to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with somebody from Biomet and share what’s in their secret sauce? Absolutely not,” he said.
But manufacturers have shared design or manufacturing practices when it makes devices or the overall surgical process safer and more effective. “That’s just industry being responsible,” he added.
