A lot has changed about Cleveland Clinic Innovations, the health system’s innovation and commercialization arm, over the past quarter-century.
Founded in 2000, Cleveland Clinic Innovations has gone from focusing largely on medical devices to now digital health and therapeutics and diagnostics. The organization has also turned global, with innovation efforts underway in London, Abu Dhabi and Canada.
In 25 years, Cleveland Clinic Innovations’ record includes over 2,800 issued patents, 900 active licenses, and 107 startups, including 27 active portfolio companies and 28 company exits.
Becker’s caught up with Geoff Vince, PhD, chief of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, about what has changed about the organization and what exciting projects it’s working on now.
Question: In talking about the past 25 years, what has changed the most about Cleveland Clinic Innovations?
Geoff Vince: I’ve actually been at the Clinic for about 33 years, so I’ve seen a lot of changes. I’ve only been directly heading Innovations for four years, but the biggest shift I’ve observed is the move from the traditional tech transfer model to what we now have: a comprehensive, integrated innovation engine that is global.
Over the past four years, we’ve focused on continuous improvement in three main areas: people, processes and systems. One of the foundational changes we made early on was introducing a team-of-teams approach. That change allows us to be quicker, scale more effectively, and align more closely with our current approach to innovation.
Q: Your team used to focus primarily on medical devices. Why did you expand into other areas?
GV: It’s interesting — while the numbers might suggest we’ve shifted away from medical devices, we actually haven’t. We remain strong in that area. What we’ve done is expand to include digital health and therapeutics. This gives us a more balanced portfolio and ensures we are future-ready. Digital health and AI are major trends, and we need to be prepared for that shift.
The market is evolving, and there are high-impact opportunities in these new areas. Also, our research head has focused on therapeutics. As those therapeutics move through research, it’s a natural progression to bring them into Innovations. So while the percentage of medical device projects has decreased, the overall number has actually gone up.
Q: What are some recent innovation projects that you’re particularly excited about or that have shown promising results?
GV: AI is on everyone’s mind right now. We have a couple of standout companies: Autism Eyes and Ambience. Both use machine learning. Autism Eyes is a scalable screening tool for the early detection of autism in children. Often, autism is diagnosed around ages 13 or 14. With Autism Eyes, we can now detect signs in eight-month-old children, which is fascinating.
Another project involves deep brain stimulation as a medical device for stroke recovery. It opens up new pathways for rehabilitation and long-term functional restoration.
Q: Cleveland Clinic Innovations has also experienced an uptick in licensing deals, invention disclosures, and successful spin-offs. What has contributed to that?
GV: It goes back to people, processes and systems. We’ve put more emphasis on rigorously vetting technologies. Our team-of-teams model includes separate groups for sourcing ideas, assessing them, developing them, and handling licensing deals. Each group has different skill sets, so we can optimize performance at each stage.
We have processes that track technology development, and we use a lean, outcomes-driven approach. We stay focused on what matters most: improving outcomes and operational efficiencies.
Q: Can you walk me through how Cleveland Clinic Innovations decides which ideas are worth developing into patents, products or companies?
GV: It’s very collaborative. We have an assessment team that looks at market potential, intellectual property position, technical feasibility, regulatory pathways, and reimbursement strategies. We seek out high-impact, high-reward areas.
By impact, I don’t just mean financial. Take Autism Eyes — it’s a small market. We pursued that technology not to make money but to improve patient care. That’s our primary driver. We also have a great network of physicians and scientists for feedback, and our internal engineers and scientists can rapidly turn an idea into a prototype.
Q: You mentioned your work has gone global. Are there unique challenges or advantages to exporting innovation?
GV: Absolutely. Different countries have different legal systems, regulatory requirements, data privacy standards, cultural expectations, and payer models. But we don’t focus on the differences — we focus on the shared goal of improving patient care. Everything else, we can work through.
Q: How do you measure return on investment for innovation projects? Is it strictly financial?
GV: We use traditional metrics like revenue, return on investment, and net present value. But clinical impact is just as important. Improving patient outcomes is key. Again, Autism Eyes is a small, underserved market — especially in pediatrics, which many medical investors avoid — but we pursued it because it makes a real difference for kids.
We also measure operational efficiency. Can we bring more patients into the Cleveland Clinic system? Can we expose more people to our care? There’s also an economic development angle. We work with the state of Ohio to ensure we’re generating jobs through spinouts and technology development. So we use both quantitative and qualitative measures.
Q: Looking to the future, what’s next for the organization in 2025 and beyond? Any exciting new focus areas or companies on the horizon?
GV: We’re focusing on expanding globally. We’ve got Cleveland Clinic London up and running. I was in Canada last week, where we have an office in Toronto. We also have operations in Abu Dhabi. These locations are fertile innovation engines — for co-investing in technologies and for initiating new ideas.
We’re also moving into a relatively new area. Traditionally, we’ve done “inside-out” innovation — taking technologies invented at Cleveland Clinic and bringing them to market. Now, we’re also identifying internal problems at Cleveland Clinic and across the U.S. healthcare system, then partnering with smaller companies (not just giants like Microsoft or Google) to co-develop operational solutions.
AI-driven healthcare innovation is another big area for us. We’re looking not just to enhance care delivery, but also to improve access so more people can experience Cleveland Clinic care.
