ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Rich in science and technology and with a strong base of leading universities, North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park has long been an important hub of biopharma activity. More recently, as seasoned medical device executives like former Medtronic CEO William Hawkins return to familiar ground, the region’s medtech community shows signs of catching up.
For a lot of reasons—the need for specialized design, development, and manufacturing skills for certain types of technology, the availability of capital, the importance of seasoned executives, among others—the medical device world has always formed around geographic clusters, most notably in places like Palo Alto, Orange County, CA, Minneapolis, Boston, Ireland, and Israel. More than even biopharma, medtech depends on an interdisciplinary set of skills and teams to execute on innovative companies.
