Team 1 Future Model Summary

Workshop Output: The Big Brain Company (BBC)

 Overview

Team 1 described a bold, disruptive vision for the future of the business, one centred on becoming what they called the “Big Brain Company” (BBC). Rather than defining the organisation by its current product portfolio, the team envisions a future in which J&J MedTech becomes the foremost authority on understanding and resolving brain disease states, with products and patient outcomes flowing naturally from that deep expertise. As one team member put it: “We’re not a stroke company anymore. We’re a big brain company.”

 The Vision: The Big Hairy Audacious Goal

The team’s starting point was a BHAG: “Let’s be disruptive!”, framed around four interconnected ambitions:

 •       Truly understand how to resolve brain issues and disease states: developing genuine clinical and scientific mastery of the conditions the business serves, going far beyond device-led thinking.

•       Bring that knowledge into the organisation to resolve those conditions: embedding brain science into how the business operates, not keeping it at arm’s length in R&D.

•       Create something genuinely new for Neurovascular (NV): go beyond NV: expanding the identity and ambition of the franchise well beyond its current scope.

•       Have this goal meaningfully progressed by 2030 (Three by Thirty): with a clear time horizon to drive accountability and a sense of stretch. As noted in the discussion: “a big hairy goal should always feel a little out of reach; if it’s too much within reach, you’re not really being ambitious.”

 Disease Focus: Opening Out to the Whole Brain

The team mapped the full range of brain conditions they believe the organisation should pursue, not as a closed list but as a signal of intent to follow unmet need wherever it exists in the brain. The conditions identified include:

 •       Haemorrhage, clots and aneurysms (the current core NV focus)

•       Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and Dementia

•       Tremors and movement disorders

•       Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE)

•       Hydrocephalus, brain tumours and tinnitus

 The team was explicit that many of these conditions currently have few or no solutions, and that the organisation is uniquely positioned, through its deep specialisation in one part of the brain, to step into this much larger space. The team referenced a brain conference in London as a source of insight into the scale of unmet need across these areas. The principle is simple: any unmet need in the brain is a legitimate target.

 How the Model Works: From the Surgical Suite to the Patient

The physical model illustrates the organisation’s value creation logic as a connected flow. It starts in the surgical suite and ends with the patient.

Surgical Suite  →  Physician Insight  →  Knowledge  →  Organisation  →  External Reach  →  Product  →  Patient Outcomes

The model represented the surgeon in the operating suite, the front line of clinical practice, as the starting point. The organisation’s role is to be present in that surgical environment: talking to physicians, learning from them, and gathering ideas about the problems they face and the opportunities they see. This is where knowledge originates.

That knowledge is then brought back into the organisation through what the team called “synapses”, represented in the physical model by pipe cleaners. These connections symbolise the cross-functional, multidisciplinary effort required to take an idea from clinical insight to commercial reality. The team was clear that these connections should be efficient and purposeful: not endless connections for their own sake, but the right links between the right people.

Where the organisation cannot fill all the gaps internally, it reaches outward, to other parts of J&J or to external organisations, to acquire the capabilities or knowledge needed to bring an idea to life. The result is a product that addresses a genuine unmet need, ultimately delivering positive patient outcomes.

 Finding and Filtering Opportunities

A significant part of the team’s discussion explored how the organisation would actually identify and prioritise opportunities across such a broad space. Several principles emerged:

•       Problem-first thinking: the team debated whether to start with a problem and assign resources to it, or to place people in roles specifically to search for problems and pull projects in. The bio-innovation model was referenced as a useful analogy: find an interesting problem, one that matters to patients and has commercial potential, and build from there.

•       Guardrails over gatekeeping: rather than a rigid process that closes down options, the team favoured a small set of clear guardrails: is there a real unmet need? Is the market large enough? Is there growth potential? These filters help focus without constraining.

•       A living funnel of ideas: not every opportunity will be viable today. Some will become accessible as technology evolves. The team advocated keeping ideas in a funnel to be revisited over time, rather than dismissing them because current capabilities fall short.

•       AI and virtual environments: technology was seen as a tool for surfacing insights and identifying gaps, not just for product development. AI and virtual settings can help the organisation understand where the problems and opportunities are across the brain landscape.

•       Openness over predetermination: the team was deliberately open about the direction of travel, resisting the temptation to pre-specify which disease areas or technology pathways to pursue. The point was not to close down, but to stay open to where the best opportunities lie.

 Organisation Design: Collective, Individual, and Augmented

The team’s radar model captured how work gets done in this future organisation across three dimensions. The balance is deliberate: no single mode of working dominates.

•       Collective: the organisation works as an interconnected team, pooling expertise across functions and geographies. The synapse-like connections in the physical model reflect this: cross-functional, multidisciplinary collaboration is the mechanism through which ideas become products.

•       Individual: deep individual expertise remains essential. The organisation needs people with genuine mastery of brain science, surgery, and clinical practice. There was also a recognition that the team has strong existing skill sets that can be leveraged and grown.

•       Augmented: technology amplifies both individual and collective capability. AI and digital tools help the organisation find problems, generate insights, and develop solutions at a pace and scale that human effort alone cannot match.

Acting Like HQ: A Strategic Shift in Mindset

A recurring theme in the team’s discussion was the need for a fundamental shift in how the organisation thinks about itself. The phrase “act like HQ” captured it well: rather than being in perpetual execution mode, reacting to what is handed down, and the organisation needs to take ownership of its own strategic direction.

The team was candid about the risk of staying too narrowly focused: “If you’re stuck in continuous improvement, the next one’s going to be a different catheter and another catheter.” The organisation has a strong leadership position right now, but sustaining that requires actively building for complexity, not as chaos but with governance and intentionality, and staying ahead of an environment where other organisations are moving fast.

This means portfolio thinking across three horizons: refreshing what exists, adding to current spaces, and actively exploring new spaces. That third horizon, finding genuinely new spaces, requires dedicated people, time, and resource. It does not happen through the standard project pipeline alone.

Summary

Team 1’s model is a compelling and coherent vision. At its heart is a shift in organisational identity: from a company that sells devices to treat brain conditions, to one that truly understands the brain and uses that understanding to drive better patient outcomes across a much wider range of disease states. The Big Brain Company is not just a name; it is a commitment to a different kind of organisation: broader in clinical scope, deeper in scientific knowledge, more strategically minded, and more ambitious in its definition of what the Neurovascular franchise can become. With a target of meaningful progress by 2030, the team has set a goal that is deliberately out of reach enough to stretch the organisation, and that is exactly the point.