Medical Devices · Consumer Health
A growth mandate.
And a device only physicians could use.
A medical device division facing divestiture under a strict corporate growth threshold. The product was a defibrillator — sophisticated, professional-use, emergency equipment.
The mandate was organic growth. The industry had no idea how to get there.
Medical device division of a diversified technology company
Category created — automatic external defibrillators
Growth Strategy · Strategic Innovation
A corporate growth rule. A stalled division. A device no consumer could use.
The parent company operated under a strict corporate portfolio rule: any division not growing at least 10% annually faced divestiture.
The medical device division had stalled, and corporate strategy needed organic growth, not acquisitions, to avoid the division being sold off.
Stop looking at medical devices. Look at who already solves this problem.
The reframe Vaxa brought was to set aside "how do we simplify our device" and ask instead: who, in any industry, already has expertise in making sophisticated technology usable by people with zero training — including children?
Thought leader panels deliberately built from outside the industry.
Growth Mandate Reframing
Reframed the growth challenge from "how do we improve our defibrillator" to "how do we create an entirely new category of device for an entirely new user.
Cross-Industry Insight Sourcing
Identified the toy industry as the source of the critical insight — expertise in simplifying advanced technology for untrained users, including young children.
Thought Leader Panel Design
Convened panels deliberately assembled from outside the medical device industry — toy designers, entertainment companies, behavioral psychologists.
Category Definition
Synthesized the panel insights into the definition of a new product category — a defibrillator simple enough for an untrained bystander to use correctly in an emergency.
A new category. Now standard equipment everywhere.
The AED category created
A category that did not exist before this work, born from a reframe that looked outside the medical device industry entirely.
First widely-adopted AED brought to market
Proved the consumerization thesis the industry had believed was impossible for this category of device.
Adoption across every consumer environment
AEDs became standard equipment across gyms, airports, supermarkets, airplanes, and homes.
Growth mandate met through category creation
The division avoided divestiture through the kind of growth only category creation can produce.
The answer came from a room with toy designers, psychologists, and technologists — looking at the problem not from within the industry but from a perspective that was hard to fathom.