Your company is either working on a robot or you’ve recently launched a surgical robot. Cash has been sunk (a lot of cash) - and engineers have been busy creating a great product.
Your illustrious leaders have been gung ho to get into this lucrative market - like a gold rush (or in some cases as a haemostatic patch to stop the bleeding from your lap businesses of towers - staplers - Endo cutters and energy devices.) (Tick the box that suits your business.)
It doesn’t matter the reason - as now you’re all in. And design choices will have been made - often a decade ago - and often based on knowledge that is maybe now even upto 15 years out of date.
But it’s hard - very hard to get over those initial internal company memes that marketing and sales folk perpetuated back in the day. Memes that stick within your meetings even today. Often back then it was to try and ridicule the growing threat of Intuitive. Often it was to justify why some business was “transiently” lost. But mostly then, and now, it’s down to ignorance of the real world of surgical robotics. You and your team are stuck rolling out the same old meme after meme.
10 years ago there were still lots of “die hard” laparoscopists from the golden era of Ethicon Endo surgery and USSC camps that reinforced the company lines of “robotics is for the urologists that can’t do laparoscopy.”
That circular robot bashing often created the baseless memes to justify internal group think combined with surgeon think.
Now - I’m not saying that some of these “thoughts” didn’t have some foundation - the odd rogue and aggressive Intuitive rep - a focus on urology to start - capital models a decade ago etc. But many of these mixed urban marketing myths have been amplified and linger. But they do not reflect reality as we stand today.
If not already out of date, they are rapidly becoming out of date - the world has moved on! Yet they often remain within detached marketing groups that continue to scramble for a “reason” for their new robotic program to exist / get more funding / give their customers reasons to believe. Keep going… even if the design choices no longer hold a unique positioning that makes sense.
The issue is - sitting in that internal think bubble is often detached from reality - and then when companies struggle to get traction in “the real world” they can’t understand what went wrong. “But no one likes Intuitive? I don’t get it?”
So here’s a few of those memes that persist today, and unless eliminated, will cause bad decision making for your robotic company - wild expectations on sales that will not be met. And above all a disconnect between what your say in marketing and what the teams on the ground run into.
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