John Morriss is good at a lot of things. His broad skill set includes mechanical engineering, product and industrial design, biology, physiology, project management, and communications, among others. He has the rare ability to dive deep into individual elements of a project while keeping an eye on the whole, continuously calculating how that progress strengthens the foundation, shifts the project’s direction, or exposes a fatal flaw.
This versatility makes Morriss perfectly suited for his role as director of Fogarty’s Invention Acceleration Program (IAP), where he works with physicians, academic faculty, and other first-time innovators to translate research projects and clinical insights into viable, fundable medical devices. “Not only does he have the technical depth and breadth to guide progress across nearly all aspects of early medical device development, but, perhaps even more importantly, he excels at seeing the connections among all of those different areas,” observed Mike Regan, Fogarty’s Chief Innovation Officer.
Searching for a path
While Morriss’ diverse interests define his career today, they were less helpful during his time as an undergraduate at Duke University. “My struggle in college was that I liked nearly everything,” he recalled. The only field he knew he didn’t want to pursue was medicine. Both parents were physicians—his mother a pediatric cardiologist and his father a neonatologist—and while he had great admiration for how hard they worked and the impact of their efforts, he knew being a doctor wasn’t for him.
Not surprisingly, when it came time to choose a major, Morriss proposed designing his own —one that would examine the intersection of engineering, design, biology, and art. However, while he found faculty champions, the administration was not convinced. With only days left to declare, Morriss decided to major in Russian. “I had always wanted to study a language that wasn’t taught in high school,” he said. He was further drawn by Russian literature—especially Dostoevsky—and by the dramatic political shifts reshaping the USSR at the time.
While the major satisfied his graduation requirements and gave him enough time to take elective classes in his other areas of interest, it also left him “completely unprepared” for the job market. Guided by his interest in design, he joined a Raleigh-based company creating exhibits for visitor centers in county and state parks.
Discovering user-centered design
That first job was formative. Designing exhibits that could engage everyone—from children eager to touch things and crash them together, to adults skimming information quickly, to experts stumbling upon displays in their own field—was a challenge he relished. “How do you make an exhibit that pulls people in and tells a compelling story for all these different groups?” he asked. “It was a great introduction to user-centered design.”
The job also led to the realization that building with plywood, steel, and graphic panels wasn’t enough. Morriss returned to school part-time and earned a second bachelor’s degree—this time in mechanical engineering.
Armed with the new degree, he headed west. “If there was a place where cool things were being made, it was California,” he said. He found interesting jobs in product development for office furniture and stereo components, but something was still missing. “The things I was working on were going to end up in a landfill in three years,” he said. “I wanted to design products with lasting value.”
Finding medtech
Putting his communication skills to work, Morriss “talked his way” into an R&D job with a company making bioabsorbable implants for facelift procedures. “I knew that was it,” he said. “I loved the technical challenge, collaborating across disciplines, and talking with physicians and explaining how the product met their needs and improved on current practices. It was a ton of fun.”
He went on to build a career in the industry, earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford and working at medtech companies including Acclarent, The Foundry, Twelve (where he first met Andrew Cleeland), and Medtronic. Along the way, he became a named inventor on more than 125 patents.
Puzzle solving in the Invention Acceleration Program
When Cleeland became the CEO of Fogarty Innovation, he recruited Morriss to launch the IAP. “He explained that I would be working with physicians for six months at a time, moving quickly to see if their early-stage ideas have what it takes to become a company,” Morriss recalled. “I loved the idea immediately.”
To date, Morriss has worked with innovators (called principal entrepreneurs) on 22 IAP projects, ranging from ablation systems for atrial fibrillation to ultrasound for pain management. He likens the process he goes through on each to puzzle solving, but with a twist. “When you work on a puzzle, you typically do the easiest part first – like building the border,” he explained. In the IAP, where the goal is to develop, refine, and pressure-test projects across key areas like value proposition, product development, intellectual property, commercialization pathway, and funding requirements, Morriss prefers to start with whatever is hardest.
“We start with that big part of a puzzle that is all one color – because that area represents the greatest risk to the project overall,” he explained. “The goal is to identify and address the biggest risks early, so that we either retire them or learn that there’s an obstacle we can’t overcome and move on.”
After their six-month stay in the IAP, the entrepreneurs leave with significant progress, a clear plan for next steps, and a deeper understanding of what it takes to bring a new medical technology forward. “I think the lasting value we offer is education about the process,” Morriss said. “The individuals who go through the IAP have great strengths in research and clinical practice. We’re teaching them something different: how to look at their projects as products.”
For many IAP participants, a key lesson is the need to consider the business side of innovation earlier. “Physicians and academic inventors often think it’s enough to just focus on R&D, and that they can hire the business and marketing people later,” he said. The truth is that you need continuity between those elements. “You have to think ahead about how you’re going to market your product and pull some of that information into your earliest design decisions,” he said.
He added, “It’s one of the harder lessons in startups. A first-generation product can’t have every feature you want. Thinking about commercialization helps you decide which features to keep and which to let go.”
A Teacher at Heart
Ultimately, John Morriss’ real calling may be teaching. “I love the challenge of educating people—telling a story that informs and engages a disparate audience,” he said. “I am most at home in front of a whiteboard, or with prototypes where we’re working hands-on.”
But like most teaching roles, his involvement in each undertaking is temporary. “I think that’s our challenge at Fogarty,” he said. “We’re intensively coaching these different groups of innovators and advising them to the best of our knowledge, but at the end of the day, the projects belong to the entrepreneurs, who make their own decisions.”
Fortunately for Morriss, there’s always the next wave of IAP projects and a new set of challenges to think his way through.