The power of doing your homework

Ok, this is going to be hard to describe without breaking confidentiality, but I think I can do it...

At work, I have a project for which I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking. After a lot of research and a few intense brainstorming sessions, all the potential ways to accomplish our objective can be broken into three general categories: passive systems, driven systems, and active systems. In my opinion, the driven systems are the most feasible, since they appear to respond better than passive systems but are far easier to implement (and probably also easier to obtain FDA clearance--but that's years off) than active systems.

After sifting through PubMed for days, reading pages upon pages of articles, I found a handful that were very promising. Eventually I realized that our objective had been all-but-accomplished using a device invented in the mid-1990's. I did all I could to track down this device, but the company that had made it no longer had any information about it on their website. Even Google turned up very little, just a few press releases and an article/advertisement from a trade journal about the FE software used during its design.

Next I searched for patents related to the device. I found the inventor, D.V., who had in fact been co-author on a few of the papers I had read. After Googling his name, I found an old alumni newsletter from MIT that had his email address. So I sent D.V. a message stating that I was interested in some of his work and had a few questions.

The very next day he replied, telling me that his company had sold the technology to another company, and he gave me the email address of R.K. to contact for more information. Interestingly, I had previously found the name of that company, but it appeared to be a dead-end: Google only had 3 pages of hits, most of which were sites that by chance had the company's name as a phrase in their text. Not even the Securities and Exchange Commission had anything about this company. But R.K. had a little bit of information spread around the web. He currently is founder and CEO of a medical device distribution company, and interestingly he holds a few exclusive licenses on certain technologies developed by NASA.

A day after emailing R.K., I received a phone call from him. I was pleasantly surprised at how willing he was to talk, and he was a friendly gentleman indeed. He seemed impressed that I had known about the NASA licenses and that he had previously (many years ago) dealt with St. Jude Medical through one of his other companies. I think the fact that I had really done my background check on him helped show that I was serious about this. We spoke for about 20 minutes, and I learned that he indeed exclusively controls the technology I am interested in, but he seems willing to "share" in a business sense. So from here, this is out of my hands and is a decision that management will make.

The moral of this story: know your shit, dig around on Google and elsewhere, and drop names. People will talk. People will listen. Knowledge is power.