Early in her 16 years at Boston Scientific, Erin McKenna ’97 and her team developed and commercialized a medical device, only to discover that clinicians felt it solved a problem that didn’t need solving. 

That experience has shaped her approach to innovation ever since, she says, prompting her to ask more questions about the needs new technologies are intended to address and the people who will ultimately use them. As she moved into technical project management, she increasingly brought engineers, marketers and clinicians together to question assumptions and better understand problems from different perspectives. 

Today, McKenna is head of medical devices and operating partner for Amplify at Mass General Brigham Innovation, where she helps Mass General researchers advance promising early-stage medical devices and diagnostic technologies toward commercialization and, ultimately, patient care. 

McKenna also directs Brigham Ignite, an early-stage translational program that helps Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers and clinicians move high-potential discoveries closer to patient care. Ignite draws in part from the model of the Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC), a National Institutes of Health-funded life science accelerator where McKenna served as deputy director. Projects receiving B-BIC awards have generated more than 20 times their initial investment on average. 

For McKenna, programs like B-BIC and Ignite help fill a critical gap between early research and the point when a discovery is far enough along to attract commercial interest. “Without funding from groups willing to invest with little follow-on ownership requirements, such as the government or other nonprofit organizations, it is difficult to fund the types of exploratory questions addressed that lead to impactful discoveries that can then be developed into solutions,” she says. “Industry isn’t going to fill that gap.” 

Her interest in the difference new technologies could make in patient care began at Stevens, where she studied chemical engineering and says the cooperative education program had the greatest impact on her career. Different work environments helped her discover where her interests fit, including a co-op at medical technology company i-STAT, now part of Abbott Laboratories, where she saw firsthand the impact bedside blood testing could have on patients. 

While her co-op experiences helped McKenna identify the kind of work that interested her, she says the late Stevens Professor Don Merino ’60 M.S. ’63 Ph.D. ’75 helped her envision a future she had not considered.  

“He told me that he believed I could be a leader in industry, specifically in technology management, and it was the first time anyone ever told me anything like that,” she says. “His guidance helped me recognize that there could be other paths for me beyond being an engineer.” 

– Charles O’Brien