My Action Learning Project

For my action learning project, I’m working with Professor David Graves in the UC Berkeley Ambient Gas Plasma Lab.

The AGP lab is developing a small medical device that can be used to prevent infection and promote wound healing. Professor Graves has hired me to look into the business and operational aspects of launching this device in the developing world. This will include exploring issues like intellectual property strategy, production strategy, barriers to adoption by medical professionals. We hope to come up with as many ideas as possible to help in the implementation of this device.

The project is just beginning. The goal is to gather as much information as possible, through internet research, case studies, and interviews with people who are more experienced in this field. The more ideas we generate that can be used when the project is launched, the better.

I hope to learn more about all the aspects of launching a new health technology. I look forward to researching what has done in the past to help healthcare providers become comfortable using new devices. Through this project I will make contacts in the medical device/international health field, and hope to learn from my interviews with them.

There’s a lot to look forward to in this project. I like the freedom I have to explore whichever aspects of this project interest me, and I like being able to learn about many different aspects of launching a device in a developing country.

There are a lot of challenges, though. I’m very much on my own with this project – the professor has never done anything like this himself. It is up to me to structure my work, and to keep this as a priority.

At this stage in the project, my main questions are on how to go about finding the information I need, how to organize my progress, and how to make the most of my interviews. Any advice from the fellows community would be very much appreciated!