ARTICLE SUMMARY:
In this interview, Phoenix Conference Innovator Award winners Mark Gelfand and Howard Levin, co-founders of the incubator Coridea, share how their complementary clinical and engineering skills enabled them to launch pioneering start-ups such as Ardian and Evalve by focusing on an often-overlooked area of innovation: physiology.
Very often, real innovation is the product of two sometimes contradictory impulses—discipline and serendipity—as innovators start out with one goal in mind and wind up with another. If the process works well, that serendipitous discovery can prove even more valuable than the original target.
Few organizations illustrate this dynamic better than Coridea, the New York City-based incubator co-founded by Mark Gelfand and Howard Levin, MD, which has given us important innovations such as renal denervation with Ardian and mitral valve repair with Evalve. More recently, Gelfand and Levin embarked on their next chapter in innovation with a novel collaboration called Deerfield Catalyst, along with investor giant Deerfield.
In recognition of the contribution that Coridea has made to innovation in medtech, this past October, the Phoenix Conference medical device meeting (organized by Lightstone Ventures, MedTech Strategist, PwC, Vensana Capital, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) presented Gelfand and Levin with its Phoenix Hall of Fame Innovator’s Award. In the following interview, Gelfand and Levin describe an approach to innovation rooted both in deep research and the surprise of discovery.
