Making Bright Ideas Work: Leveraging Local Resources with Powerful Global Networks

Two Sunrise Labs heavy hitters, Chuck Smith, Principal Mechanical Engineer, and Doug Browne, Director of Mechanical Engineering and Design Transfer, joined host Tyler Kern for an in-depth discussion on leveraging local expertise for medical device development.

Both the term medical devices and the expertise needed to create such equipment are broad in their scope. Still, at Sunrise Labs, it is not uncommon to receive requests for all different types of medical devices. Rising to meet the challenge can require a broad array of local expertise to get the job done.

“One thing at Sunrise, all of our full product development entails electrical integration, circuit boards, software, mechanical,” Browne said. “We’re not just designing high-volume widgets; we’re designing complex systems. And we know it’s a global economy; it’s a global world. To meet customers’ cost targets, you’re going to need to reach out to a wide spectrum of manufacturing bases, as well as an engineering design base.”
Utilizing local connections with global connections allows Sunrise Labs to leverage these capabilities to their fullest extent.

Smith noted Sunrise Labs’ Southern New Hampshire headquarters as a benefit for taking advantage of all the various New England technology-based companies that can support their efforts in building new product prototypes. “I’ve had parts picked up from a machine shop in the morning, dropped off at a brazing house in the afternoon, then had them picked up the next day and installed on a prototype before lunch, all from within a very short distance.”

And while the ability to reach out to a local network to create something nearby is desirable, there are times when these local networks have helped Smith with projects where some needed parts were just not available in the U.S. “I worked with a stateside molder who partnered with a machine shop in Korea. The molds themselves were made in Korea, then shipped back here. I stood by the injection molding machine while the parts were being run, and the process was being tuned doing fit checks every couple hours until we got a result that would exceed,” Smith said. “Once everything was fine-tuned, these molds went back to Korea where they could then mass-produce the parts at a much more economical scale.”

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Twitter – @MarketScale
Facebook – facebook.com/marketscale
LinkedIn – linkedin.com/company/marketscale

Follow us on social media for the latest updates in B2B!

Image

Latest

human-centered
How Human-Centered Design Led to a Startup Accelerator for Education: A Conversation with Transcend Network’s Co-founder Michael Narea
June 20, 2025

The convergence of human-centered design and education innovation is reshaping how edtech ventures emerge and scale. As AI enables hyper-efficiency and bootstrapped entrepreneurship becomes more viable, the real differentiator is empathy—founders who listen deeply to users before building solutions. A McKinsey study of 300 public companies found that design-led organizations significantly outperformed their peers, with…

Read More
care navigation
AI-Powered Care Navigation Reduces Healthcare Spend and Improves Patient Access
June 20, 2025

The U.S. healthcare system is strained by rising costs, uneven quality, and fragmented care navigation. Employers are bearing the brunt, spending more without always securing better care for their teams. According to the RAND Corporation, one effective strategy is to “change their network and benefit designs to encourage patients to use lower‑priced, higher‑value providers…

Read More
edge computing
Building the Wireless Future: Low-Power IoT, Edge Computing, and the End of the Gs
June 19, 2025

As the global race to 6G heats up, telecom providers, governments, and tech companies are investing billions to advance the next generation of hyperconnected infrastructure. European operators urge regulators to release more spectrum to stay competitive, while U.S. programs like the USDA’s ReConnect have funneled over $1 billion into rural fiber backhaul. Meanwhile, companies like…

Read More
healthcare operations
Healthcare Operations Improve with AI That Unites Data, Automation, and Ethics
June 18, 2025

Generative AI has captured the public imagination, but its most transformative use cases may lie far from flashy consumer tools. In healthcare operations, where complexity, inefficiency, and fragmentation remain persistent challenges, AI is now driving measurable improvements. Research suggests AI-enabled healthcare systems could cut administrative costs by up to $360 billion in the U.S. alone….

Read More