How Abbott Laboratories Used Silicon Valley's Game Plan To Build A Better Medical Device

Smaller companies are nimbler and move faster to seize innovation, common-speak says. Now meet a unit of global health care giant Abbott Laboratories that is taking a page out of the startup playbook. Abbott Vascular Inc., a Santa Clara-based division of 69,000-employee Abbott Labs (NYSE: ABT), wanted a kind of scaffold that could open arteries that carry blood away from the heart. The knotty problem was that it wanted to go beyond old-school stents, onto which the gunk that swims through the blood could attach and ultimately plug the arteries again.

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