After 7 months on the job, Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak laid out his vision for transforming the world’s largest pure-play medical device maker today at his first appearance at the J.P. Morgan health care comference in San Francisco.
"The company hasn’t grown in the past several years," Ishrak said. "Execution has been inconsistent [and] the business model has been fairly static. … Our business model has to be adjusted without sacrificing the quality of care."
To do that, he said, the company is focusing on 3 key initiatives: Improving execution, optimizing innovation and accelerating the spread of its global footprint.
"We want a business that moves quickly and is agile," Ishrak said. "We cannot move too slowly."
Stay tuned to MassDevice.com for a 1-on-1 interview with Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak later today
To improve execution, Medtronic is re-aligning its businesses to focus on efficiency and is instituting "operating rigor" – a "systematic and regular method for follow up and management," Ishrak said.
As for optimizing innovation, "it’s pretty clear to me that this is not about getting engineers to work harder,"he noted. "It really is more about what we work on and getting more efficient."
And that means making sure each product in the pipeline has a value proposition.
"If there is no value proposition, the innovation is not going to succeed. The economic value of our products is especially important in this environment," he said.