Irish medical devices developer i360 Medical has entered a venture in Florida to allow inventors to submit ideas that can be developed into commercially-viable products.

I360 Medical, which started out in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 2009, said on Thursday it has signed an agreement with Baptist Health South Florida, which operated 10 hospitals, to create the so-called Innovation Institute Miami. This aims to develop a pipeline of medical devices and applications and allow inventors put forward their ideas for healthcare advancements.

"We are confident that our partnership will identified a number of leading medical device concepts that can be developed to commercialisation in the US and abroad" said Derek Young, chief executive of i360 Medical.

“The biggest challenge in medical innovation is being able to identify unmet clinical needs and to bring an idea from concept to commercialisation and all of the stages between that. We have created a proven model which allows us to work with healthcare organisations to identify and cultivate an innovation ecosystem for medical device concepts and then work with our partners to develop the concept further and bring it to the market and patient bedside.”