Case Study: Scopus improves product development outcomes
Scopus is the choice of preference for more than 3,000 academic, government and corporate institutions. This is what James, a research pathologist for a medical device manufacturer who works with Scopus on a regular basis, told us about his experience.
James is an experienced research pathologist for a medical device manufacturer, busy with at least 10 projects at any given time. His contribution to product development ranges from shaping early stage proof-of-concept work to preparations for submission to regulatory authorities. The common denominator for him is to understand disease states and product impacts on the body.
James spends about 20% of his time on large, breakthrough innovation projects on a team dedicated to uncovering new ideas. The product innovation process starts with discussing approaches and capabilities for addressing a problem. James and his team then gather input from industry opinion leaders as well as physicians and surgeons treating the disease or injury state.
Literature review plays the important role of anchoring the team to current science and sizing the potential market. “Scopus just helps us know that we are going in the right direction,” James says. “We view a lot of literature to see what, if anything, people have done in the past. And we also have to predict the market, so we know if it’s going to be a small or large population.”
James relies on Elsevier’s Scopus two to three times a week as he works across multiple teams and projects. For him, Scopus is an efficient, time-saving way to get up to speed and identify what others have done to address the problem: “Scopus helps me to get familiar with different models and what people are thinking,” he explains. “It helps me to quickly build a basis to make a decision on next steps and prepare us for more extensive literature searches as we go through the process and approach submission to regulatory authorities and a complete launch. It quickly delivers the basics that we need to understand things.”
“Speed is very important. Many of the questions I receive must be answered right away or at least the next day. So I need something to base the answer on,” James says. “Scopus is nice because it’s linked to any journals we have rights to, so we can pull up a full article online… I can easily identify what I think I need to know, read it, digest it, and move on to the next one.”