Dr. Stuart Grant, founder of Archetype Medtech, shares his journey designing and delivering breakthrough orthopedic and surgical innovations across the UK, US, and China. Stuart recounts how an early internship led him into medtech, what kept him there, and how building the ASPAC Innovation Center in China helped accelerate a total knee instrument system that dramatically reduced time to market. He explains the leap from corporate leader to entrepreneur: planning for years, earning a PhD in Medtech Product Innovation, and building a consultancy that helps startups and scale-ups turn early clinical unmet needs into market-ready, regulator-approved devices through a network of experts and an “expertise for equity” model. 

Guest links: https://archetype-medtech.com/ 

Charity supported: Sleep in Heavenly Peace

Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at [email protected]. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world.

[00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them.

[00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives.

[00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives.

[00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives.

[00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host Lindsey, and today I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Stuart Grant. Dr. Grant is a chartered engineer and the founder of Archetype Medtech, a consultancy and innovation studio helping medical device startups and scale ups transform early clinical, unmet needs into market ready products.

With nearly 25 years of experience, Stuart has led global teams across the UK, US, China, and emerging markets delivering breakthrough innovations in hip, knee, shoulder, and trauma surgery. A highlight of his career was establishing the ASPAC Innovation Center in China, where he built R&D capability from the ground up and launched a pioneering total knee instrument system that dramatically reduced time to market. Passionate about advancing medical technology and mentoring future engineers, he bridges creativity, engineering, and regulation to accelerate safer, smarter medtech innovation worldwide.

All right. Welcome to the show. It's so great to have you here today. Thanks for joining me.

[00:01:57] Stuart Grant: It's lovely to be here, Lindsey.

[00:01:58] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Excellent. Well, I was wondering if you could start by sharing a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you to medtech.

[00:02:08] Stuart Grant: Yeah. So, I was actually, I'm obviously, as you can tell from my accent, I'm British, but I was born in Germany because my, my dad was in the military in the 1970s when I was born. So I was born actually in Berlin, which is quite interesting to be a place to be, grew up in. So I traveled around a lot here in the UK, in Germany with my dad getting posted everywhere. My mom's a nurse. So I was in medtech, not really knowing I was in medtech as a kid, but I, my family was, so yeah. And then obviously went to school, all the places I was at university. I went to university to do product design, and my goal was to be a product designer, a cool product designer, designing fancy products like Johnny Ive.

And when I was looking for a job as a co-op, or an intern as you call them in the US, I was just really unsuccessful finding a job. I was doing a lot of interviews, getting turned down, sending my CV out a lot, and j happened just to advertise on the Board of University, and it said Johnson Orthopedics and no one really knew what that was in. And none of my fellow students at applied because they thought it would be designing baby bottles for putting talcum powder in and shampoo in and stuff like that.

So they're like, "I'm not doing that job." So I desperately applied for it and luckily found out about all this medtech, and I've been here doing medtech for 25 years. So they gave me a job. I had to work hard to keep the job and get reemployed over and over again. But yeah, joining originally Johnson Orthopedics a long time ago is how I found out about medtech. I never knew when I was 18 that really it was a thing that existed.

[00:03:47] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. So, okay. So you thought product design, and then when you got into medtech, what were some of the things that attracted you and that actually compelled you to stay and make a career out of it?

[00:04:00] Stuart Grant: Ha. So I was a young guy with the student debts. What compelled me, I was getting paid to stay, but not to be too flippant about it, but, you know, when I was doing this engineering and design work in my early days in the CAD system, it was just so interesting. I was designing these products that were going into people or the instrumentation to make help the surgeon and going to these ORs and watching the surgeon do their job and trying to figure out how how I can make it better from their input was really interesting. I could apply it straight away, basically.

In the early two thousands, there wasn't all these regulations and standards that slowed you down. So you could go and design an instrument, get it machined in the machine shop, get it clean, take it to the surgeon, he can use it, you know, probably be frowned upon 25 years later. But that's what we used to do and really adapt. And probably more interesting than going into product design and fast moving consumer goods where you're designing a, a kettle or a toaster or something, a plastic casing. It was actually much more interesting to do that.

And I stayed because I spent four years here in Leeds, in the UK, was getting a bit bored and wanted to find something else to do, and then an opportunity came up in the US. So I moved over to Warsaw, Indiana, the orthopedics capital of the world, as you might know it. Worked there for, stayed there for seven years. Really enjoyed it.. People sort of bemoan Warsaw for being in the sticks in just a bunch of cornfields around it. But I enjoyed it. It's got, we had a good bunch of young friends there. I was in late twenties, early thirties at the time. There was Noah and Spikes. You'd go for a drink and some nice food. It was all right.

I enjoyed my time and after that I was, after seven years, I was like, "Okay, what do I do next?" And I was looking around for jobs in medtech. Then another opportunity came up in and we were looking for people to go over and help set it up, train the staff on what MedTech product development was. And so I jumped to the chance and spent five years living in China, in Shanghai. After five years is your limit, so I had to come home. I couldn't stay. I wanted to stay, but they wouldn't allow me to. So, so I came back to the UK.

And then started MDR for five years as leading the Joints MDR program, which was lots of fun, as you could probably tell, wasn't really R&D, was a lot of leadership and project management and dealing with a lot of people and a lot of problems on a day-to-day basis. And so, yeah, after that I I left J&J about three years ago and started my own product development agency. And we can talk about a little bit about that later. So that's where I am and where I got to.

[00:06:50] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent. Yeah, I definitely wanna talk about that as well. But going back a little bit-- and perhaps this is actually something that's occurred since you started your own company as well-- but are there any moments that really stand out to you along your journey of affirming that, "Hey, yeah, I actually am in the right place, in the right industry?"

[00:07:12] Stuart Grant: That's a really hard one is sort of the, is the grass always greener somewhere else, type of question. Right? I guess compare, you shouldn't compare, but comparing to my friends at my university, my product design and what they've done and what I've done they've moved into the car industry a lot. Went to the car development and car industries always had its ups and downs and its problems. And you know, they've had some really cracking jobs working for McLaren and Ferrari and you know, but I think just the interesting things that medtech do that nobody really knows about is really what keeps me moving along and having conversations with people when they, you tell them like, "I used to design hips and knees and shoulders and things like that," and they're like, "Oh, my mother's got a hip and knee" and blah, blah, and you really talk about it. Actually, my mother does have a hip now and she's going in a couple months time to get the other hip done. I do know what brand she's got, so.

[00:08:10] Lindsey Dinneen: See, that's really cool. Yeah. Okay. So, so, on your LinkedIn I noticed that you describe yourself as a fixer, a challenger, and a change maker, which I love. But I'd love to hear from you exactly what you mean by all those things as you have developed in your career, and now as you're doing, of course, your own consulting.

[00:08:34] Stuart Grant: Yeah, so in Johnson and my colleagues are probably, I agree with this, I had a bit of a reputation of getting the more difficult projects. The, that's probably why I got MDR in the end 'cause I would always get the projects that had problems and I enjoyed that. I liked digging deep and solving the problem and wrangling everyone together and pushing everybody along to help. And that was actually one of the reasons why I moved to the US 'cause the original project I moved to was the project leader left and it was in a bit of a shambles. So I went over to sort of, sort of try and get it together and just ended up staying and working on multiple projects. So I like that.

Really challenging, not just the engineering side. The engineering side is obviously really interesting, but the challenging project management and people management and process management in a big corporation, all of those things, people, product, process, all come together just to cause a big headache sometimes, you know, herding cats as say and going, trying to solve those problems as an engineer, always trying to solve these problems, right? So it's you're always trying to figure out how you can move forward.

[00:09:52] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so that kind of brings us to the company. So what was it like going from employee to entrepreneur? Were you, did you feel ready and prepared for that leap? Or what has that transition and pathway been for you?

[00:10:10] Stuart Grant: So I've, I was a long-term planner. I was planning for this for five years whilst I was working for Johnson. So I went and got, when I came back to the UK I started my PhD and I knew getting a PhD was a real way of building credibility immediately, right? Before you step in a room and have a conversation with you, if you've got a PhD in the subject you're about to talk about, people pay attention, hopefully. Right? So I did my, so I did my PhD in Medtech Product Innovation, what the process is. So I spent seven years part-time working for Johnson, getting my PhD, knowing that eventually in my mid forties, there'll be an inflection point, which usually isn't people in big corporations, right, that either stay to the end for until you're six, mid sixties. If you hit 50, usually stay for the next decade, right? Or you leave and do something else.

And I was like, "Okay, 45, I'm gonna pull the bandaid, go in, get my PhD, set up my own company plan, get the plan to do it, get the savings," and so I was working on MDR and a new MDR was coming to an end, and then they'd have to find me a new project, which probably didn't exist. So I also knew that J&J would be like, "Ah, Stuart, you've been here for 23 years. There's not really anything of your level here." I'd be like, "Great, let's go." So this was all a, you always it's a big step, right? I have a family. I can't just sort of walk in, not come in the office anymore. So it was a big plan that my wife and I had for quite a number of years to execute. So it's still a struggle. I've been doing it for three years. It's still hard work, still building the company, finding clients, understanding what their pain points are and improving your picture and all those other things, still is still a challenge, but it's a new challenge.

[00:12:06] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:12:07] Stuart Grant: And as I say, as I said, when people worry about the risk, it's like I can easily just go and get a corporate job again as a move back and have all this new relevant experience. So it's a risk, but you have to balance that by the benefits.

[00:12:21] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, calculated risk that you've planned for, so good for you. So, okay, so tell us a little bit about your company now and who you help and kind of where in the development or even ideation process that you can come in and really make a difference.

[00:12:40] Stuart Grant: So, yeah, so Archetype MedTech is a product development, product innovation agency. And what we do, we usually work with startups or scale ups. Startup side, they'll have a proof of concept. They've already defined the unmet clinical need. They've sort of wrangled the technology and validated the actual technology does what it they're trying to make it do, but they just dunno how to make this a medical device product, right? They've they've got the technology, but they dunno how the product make a product that's sellable is releasable and it gets approved by FDA or here in the, i'll say here in the EU, I know I said in the UK, but MDR and I help them work out that product innovation strategy.

So take them all through either they need to do the frontend innovation and understand their needs and the insights and the business case, and then the engineering requirements and specifications. The design and engineering part I help them with, and this is not just me. I have a network of experts, a sort of consortium of experts that come together and bring all these different specialties and then we help them with the testing, what testing they need to do, their risk management, usability, all that fun stuff. And then contact and help them work with the manufacturers. So contract manufacturers, then their regulatory approval.

So really what we try to do is, 'cause we're bringing all this expertise as a group of people together, the entrepreneur, usually a salesman or surgeon at this point, who may be a university spin out, can spend a lot of time and money trying to find these experts, trying to find these resources, trying to understand the product development, the MedTech product development process, which is all written down in various books, but when you get down to the details, it gets really complicated. So what we do is help them go through that as fast and as efficiently as a possible, so they're not wasting capital fishing around for those experts. We already have that network of experts that we can bring in and take them through the process as quickly as possible.

So that's what Archetype Medtech do for our clients. And has been successful. We have quite a number of clients, mostly in orthopedics and surgical 'cause that's my specialty in medtech. And what we also do, we just don't want to be a management consultancy firm. Well, we do if it's right, we share what we call expertise for equity. So we'll take some equity from the company, but we'll cut our day rates or maybe do it for free, do and help them go through the process as quickly as possible. That means we've got skin in the game, right? We're not just taking their money and going, "Great. This is great. Good luck on the commercialization. Not our problem."

[00:15:29] Lindsey Dinneen: Right.

[00:15:30] Stuart Grant: It is our problem. 'cause we want a return on our risk and our investment as well. So, yeah, that's what we try to do. And along with that we do a load of pro bono work with surgeons in the NHS who have had ideas. We help them just get their idea a bit further along so they can start looking for funding and investment, and I can share that with you later 'cause it's a really important program that the NHS run it. If there's any mentors out there that want to get involved I can point them in the right direction.

[00:16:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Actually that's fantastic and I would love to hear a little bit more about the organization and yeah, how people can get involved and help and what do they all do.

[00:16:10] Stuart Grant: Yeah. So the NHS have set up this called NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs Program. This is not my company. This is a completely separate organization. And what it is, clinicians, anybody who works in the NHS-- you know NHS is a 1.6 million people who are employed in the NHS. It's a massive company organization. They come up with clinical needs 'cause they're in the problem and they start working out how they solve it, even through medical device or health tech or an app or anything, right? And they can go into this, it is basically the equivalent of an accelerator program over about nine months. And we have mentors like myself who work with those clinicians to help them develop their idea.

So I've got a couple of clinicians that I work with. One is developing a neurosurgical device for helping him cut out tumors in the brain. At the moment, they use two tools. They use a scalpel and a cordy, a bipolar cordy, and they're very basic tools. And what he has to do, he's under a microscope, and he has to swap these one by one, does this scalpel to cut the vascularization of the tumor. Then he has to seal it. And he has to pass the nurse has to pass in these tools and he can't see a, see the nurse passing him. So he is like, "Can I develop a tool that's in one a scalpel and a bipolar" so he doesn't have to keep changing the tool in his hand? And you can know by the cognitive load and changing that tool in the field that these surgeries take eight to 12 hours to cut out a tumor from the brain. So he's saying every, he swaps his tool about 200 times and it takes three seconds. So you can start doing the maths.

[00:17:59] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah.

[00:18:01] Stuart Grant: Yeah. And then the other, so the other is a doctor, actually, the doc is a neonatal doctor and he's trying to develop a langoscope for neonatal babies. The langoscopes at the moment haven't really improved in the last 60 years. The Muller blades, they're called, and they're the stainless steel things that basically adult ones have been shrunk down to baby size and changed a little bit. They're not very good. And when you've got a newborn baby who's struggling to breathe, the mother's there obviously upset, so the father's probably there and you're trying to get langoscope down their throat, it's not a great, it is a very stressful situation, so he's kind of developed a, trying to develop a better one, right?

Even the simple things. These things are made of stainless steel and you put a piece of metal on a baby's tongue. A newborn baby's obviously never experienced cold before, so they obviously start freaking out and squirming and you're trying to get this thing down her throat. It's crazy. So I'm helping him to see if he can come up with a better solution. He's got a, got an idea at the moment. He's developed some prototypes and we're gonna help him get it, see if we can get it a bit further along, and hopefully get to the market and solve this real small unmet clinical need, but really important one.

[00:19:16] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. That's incredible to hear about both of those stories. That is really exciting. I love I-- this is partly why I love this industry so much is the innovation coming out of it is always amazing. People care so deeply about making a difference and improving patient outcomes, and then to hear about those kinds of innovations, ugh, that's awesome.

[00:19:38] Stuart Grant: Yeah. Yeah. So if there's any experts out there listening who wanna get involved in the N-H-S-C-E-P program, I know Australia does one too. So yeah, get involved and share your knowledge freely to some clinicians who wanna, who have found an unmet clinical need and wanna solve it, but don't know how to.

[00:19:56] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Love it. That's fantastic. So it, it seems like, you know, from your career trajectory and your continuing education all this time that you are not someone who sits still very well. And I think you mentioned this a little bit in your LinkedIn profile, you like to keep moving. So one of the things that I noticed that you do, and I'd love if you share about it, is you do lectures on the history of innovation. Could you share a little bit about that?

[00:20:24] Stuart Grant: Yeah. So. I I really, so I sort of got into reading about innovate. I love reading innovation books, right, nonfiction, innovation books, which I got in about 10 years ago. I read probably one of the first one was "The Idea Factory," which is about Bell Labs. And that was how Bell Labs has invented the telephone system and invented the transistor, won a load of Nobel Prizes. Shockley and Bardine were there. They just had this crazy Medici effect going on in Bell Labs. The Medici effect when you collect everybody together in a small area and they just start bouncing ideas and coming up with some hugely creative solutions. And that comes from Florence when DaVinci and Michelangelo and Raphael were all kicking about Florence and they were all paid for by the Medici family, so this why it's called the Medici. There's a book about it actually called "The Medici Effect."

So I started reading all this and started just going backwards in history and getting to the industrial revolution and how the industrial revolution happened. And going further back to these group of men called the Lunar Men who were in Birmingham here in the UK who basically, it was James Watt, who invented the steam engine, Wedgewood, who was the pottery guy. It is Rasmus Darwin, who was Charles Darwin's great-grandfather. Yeah. All these people, they were called the Lunar Man 'cause they met every month in the full moon and discussed ideas and I think probably got drunk.

[00:22:00] Lindsey Dinneen: I mean...

[00:22:03] Stuart Grant: So yeah, I just love reading it and you know, I love, I'm now a little bit of a brag. As of last month, I'm a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and that is quite prestigious that was created by George Stevenson, and George Stevenson was the guy who created the steam train.

[00:22:23] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay.

[00:22:23] Stuart Grant: So we took Watts' idea of the steam engine, put it on wheels, figured out how to work. And I love, I just love steam trains and that's very dorky of me, I know. But I love, as a mechanical engineer, just seeing all the bits move and actually seeing them chug around all the noise and the steam. And here where I live in Yorkshire, in the UK, up the road in York is the National Railway Museum, which all the steam trains are at. Darlington is west. George Stevenson had his the original railway, the Darton Stock Railway. So George Stevenson created the Institute of Mechanical Engineers 'cause he was a mechanical engineer and his son created the rocket the first really fast once, Robert Stevenson.

So learning all this and then figuring out how, then I went back-- I'm, so this is a long answer to your question-- then I went back went back and like understood why the industrial revolution happened and it was all about the banking system here, how people could get capital. And then the legal system grew up to protect that capital. And then agriculture improved in the UK so people weren't just stuck on farms, subsistence farming. There was enough food being produced to support the population so the population could go and work in factories and obviously James Watt creating the steam power created more power. So people in horses and everybody didn't have to work so hard.

And then there was politics involved with the Hugonos, which were the Protestant, the French Protestants came over and they had all, they had the ability to make all these machine parts, 'cause that's our skill. Some of them came to the UK and the others went to Switzerland. And that's where the watch industry in Switzerland created. And then, you know, and then the scientific approach and the enlightenment came in the UK and it all just sort of bubbled up into the industrial revolution and then cascaded through the 19th century and the 20th century in. Here we are in the 21st century. So I just love knowing that whole pathway of somebody said "We need more legal," and then somebody said, "We need more banking" and as startups, right, investment is the king. So it all started 300 years ago with the UK banking system.

[00:24:35] Lindsey Dinneen: Fascinating. Oh my goodness. That is so interesting. Yeah. Okay. One other interesting thing I caught from your LinkedIn profile is that you are a painter, but you are an exhibited painter, yes?

[00:24:51] Stuart Grant: Yeah, I, well, I try.

[00:24:54] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay.

[00:24:54] Stuart Grant: So yeah. Obviously I did product design right? And I did product design because at school, I was good at art and I was good at maths and physics. So I was looking around going, "What discipline do those three things fit together?" And it looked like it was product design. I was like, "Okay, I'm half an engineer, half an artist, not good at either." So about 10 years ago I decided to pick up art again. It was, started to go to classes and doing landscapes and actually sadly the industrial decline of Britain's, so the old buildings of the industrial revolution and stuff like that. So I paint that stuff.

[00:25:36] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh, that's so cool.

[00:25:37] Stuart Grant: Put it into exhibitions and sometimes get rejected, sometimes get accepted, and try and sell a couple so I can at least call myself an artist.

[00:25:45] Lindsey Dinneen: There you go. I love it. Yeah. Well, and that creativity and that artistry does, you know, impact your work in general, because I think sometimes having that outlet actually spurs some just creative solutions outside of the box that, you know, might have not come to you immediately if you were just like, you know, head down, really working hard on this project. And then if you could take a step back do you feel that it helps you in that way at all?

[00:26:15] Stuart Grant: Yeah. Yeah, it definitely does. Not thinking about work is and just having it percolate in the background and not actually, 'cause it's a very slow deliberate process painting, right? So it does, you just lose hours and hours painting something, which is really nice. Obviously I've got a, I've got a 5-year-old at the moment running around, so I don't do that much painting. I usually just reserve it for when I go to my art class on Wednesday nights 'cause trying to focus is not a thing for a 5-year-old.

[00:26:46] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, That's fair. Okay. Well, all right, so pivoting the conversation just for fun. Imagine that you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a master class on anything you want. It could be within your industry. It also could be your history of innovation, but what would you choose to teach?

[00:27:08] Stuart Grant: So I thought about this when you gave that question because I was like, "Well, I've already talked about the history of innovation and that can pretty boring." So my other boring side, when you do a PhD, you always wish you did another subject. That's the thing is like, I wish I studied that instead. So my, as you go through the PhD, you learn other things and you're like, "Oh, that's really interesting." And you go down rabbit holes and you're like, "Oh, well stop. That's not my job. That's not what I'm trying to do here."

One of the ones was how technology and society are interlinked. So technology drives society, and we've got lots of examples of that. Steam engines, trains, telephones, electricity, light bulb, broadband, and now AI. And so technology affects society. Then society drives technology. They're a virtuous circle. Some people say it not virtuous at all, but they, that's what happens. And understanding how those two things, society and culture and technology all interact is really interesting to me.

And obviously not all technologies are adopted. Some are abandoned. Sometimes the better technology is abandoned for an inferior technology for lots and lots of reasons. There's examples. In the eighties, it was VHS and beta max, Blu-ray and HD DVDs. And what else? The keyboard, QWERTY keyboard is meant to be terrible. And that was designed 'cause of typewriters at the time. So the keys didn't smash together, but obviously that's not needed anymore.

So those things interest me and I like to study that more, but I like to study it. Thinking about medtech and how our technology in medtech has affected society and using that lens 'cause we also always talk about clinical needs, right? What's your unmet clinical need? What are you trying to solve here? But there's also a social and cultural need that you are maybe not addressing directly, but you are addressing it. And how that drives medtech, and you know, it's we talk about like medtech equality and democratizing medtech and making it more accessible, but there's always the flip size of medtech inequalities.

The big one probably at the moment is robotic surgery. Hugely expensive. Only available to very few. So how will that filter through society? How does that affect society? Will it just be for the rich developed countries to use robotic surgery? How will that affect it going forward the next 10, 20 years? Because it uses a capital equipment, right? They can't be diffused through society very easily. So that, that's one thing I would like to study and sort of talk about a little bit more, 'cause I think it's really interesting, especially now AI is being talked about and how digitizing healthcare is gonna happen over the next decade. Interesting if we're overclaiming that at the moment and a lot of startups are overclaiming, what they can really do and is it gonna, is there gonna be a backlash? Who knows? Let's see. In our, maybe in a decade, I'll present a course on it.

[00:30:23] Lindsey Dinneen: There you go. Okay. And time will tell. Alright. I like it. Very cool. Okay. And how do you wish to be remembered after you leave this world?

[00:30:34] Stuart Grant: Yeah. My PhD was like, I would probably like, I'd like to remember my PhD findings, but I'm like, no, who cares?

[00:30:44] Lindsey Dinneen: Oh.

[00:30:45] Stuart Grant: I, I've got, of course, my family, making an impact on my, what I've done here with my family, but, and I was really thinking about this question earlier. I was like, "Well, I hope this isn't the end. I hope I haven't peaked."

[00:31:02] Lindsey Dinneen: Yes, that's fair, okay.

[00:31:06] Stuart Grant: So maybe the next 20, 30 years, hopefully I'll be remembered for something, I hope.

[00:31:12] Lindsey Dinneen: Okay. To be determined. I like that. I like that a lot all right.

[00:31:18] Stuart Grant: It's a positive.

[00:31:20] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. It's, and it's a forward way of thinking that, you know, you don't have to limit yourself to what you've already done or accomplished or seen. Who knows? The world is exciting. Yeah. I like it. Okay.

[00:31:33] Stuart Grant: Well, yes, I'm yeah, definitely.

[00:31:35] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, all.

[00:31:36] Stuart Grant: One of the things we're doing-- I was looking at the Australian MedTech market and really just trying to figure out what's going on to see if there's anything I can do there. And talking to my wife, we decided, 'cause my daughter's not at school yet, we decided, "Let's go to Australia for an extended holiday." And it was gonna be like a month and we'll start working it all out, like we're just gonna go for three months, March, April and May this year, to sort of experience Australia, experience the MedTech market, go meet a lot of people, understand and just sort of grow and try to understand another way of people.

I know Australia, they've got a similar culture to the UK and the US. But they do, they are far away. So they have a different take on things. And I wanna see what a difference is and see if I can get involved. So we're off to Australia on the MedTech market, so if anybody's listening, reach out to me on LinkedIn. It'll be we'll hopefully when I'm over there, we are in Brisbane. We can meet up.

[00:32:32] Lindsey Dinneen: Excellent. Yeah, no, that's really exciting. And I actually have a few people I can connect you with as well, so, yeah. Okay. And then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it?

[00:32:48] Stuart Grant: Oh. I think it's, it is back to my old answers, it's back to the steam trains. I just love watching the mechanism going around. My, me and my daughter who's exhibiting engineering characteristics, shall we say. Love, we love going to the railway museum and running around 'cause you can go and touch the trains, you can get on them, you can get your hands greasy if you want to, if you touch the wrong bit of it. She loves seeing them. And they're just, so when these engineers designed all these big bits of metal, they didn't have FEA or CAD or anything. They just sort of took a guess at the curves and how it should look. And some of these parts they designed are so beautiful when you start looking at them, it just makes me smile, like there was a person, a man, we'll have to say a man, right, 'cause it was 200 years ago...

[00:33:44] Lindsey Dinneen: Right.

[00:33:44] Stuart Grant: A engineer who decided he was gonna make it like that out of wood. And they were cast into iron and they just they were just sitting in their shop and just did what they thought was right. And most of the time it didn't break.

[00:34:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Most of the time. There you go. Yeah. That's great. I love that. Well this has really been a fantastic conversation. I'm so grateful for you joining me today and sharing just some of your history and you know, what you're looking forward to next. I think it's, I think it's really incredible when you get to combine all the different things, like you said. You've got sort of that design and problem solving and you've got the engineering and you've got all these cool things that just make you an incredible help to the MedTech industry. And we're excited to be making a donation on your behalf, as a thank you for your time today, to Sleep in Heavenly Peace, which provides beds for children who don't have any in the United States. So thank you for choosing that charity to support. Thanks for joining and thanks for everything you're doing to change lives for a better world.

[00:34:52] Stuart Grant: Yeah, thanks, Lindsey. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.

[00:34:55] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you again.

[00:35:00] Dan Purvis: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium Medical. Velentium Medical is a full service CDMO, serving medtech clients worldwide to securely design, manufacture, and test class two and class three medical devices. Velentium Medical's four units include research and development-- pairing electronic and mechanical design, embedded firmware, mobile app development, and cloud systems with the human factor studies and systems engineering necessary to streamline medical device regulatory approval; contract manufacturing-- building medical products at the prototype, clinical, and commercial levels in the US, as well as in low cost regions in 1345 certified and FDA registered Class VII clean rooms; cybersecurity-- generating the 12 cybersecurity design artifacts required for FDA submission; and automated test systems, assuring that every device produced is exactly the same as the device that was approved. Visit VelentiumMedical.com to explore how we can work together to change lives for a better world.