Medidata was founded on a simple (but at the time revolutionary) innovation: Using the web to collect, check and provide remote access to Clinical Trial data. But as a company grows it’s easy to focus on the official roadmap and miss out on unexpected opportunities that crop up along the way.

Google recognized this with its “20% time” innovation program, which freed engineers one day a week to focus on their own innovation projects. At Medidata we have a similar program, providing our software engineers a chance to work on their own projects.

One of the challenges of any Innovation Time program is providing enough time to deliver something meaningful. Our program screens potential Innovation Time ideas, provides mentors to engineers undertaking projects and then tries to provide two weeks of distraction-free time to focus on that idea and deliver something that can be demonstrated to the wider company. Where possible we encourage these projects to provide code that can be shared with the wider community through Open Source (for example see Andrew Smith’s post on Cleric)

A recent product of the Medidata innovation program is Medidata Engage, a patient-engagement application designed to provide an improved feedback loop to patients taking part in clinical trials.

Watch an introductory video:

Read more about the development of Medidata Engage and meet the team behind it at our sister Blog, Geeks Talk Clinical, in their post Setting the Stage for Real Patient Engagement in Clinical R&D