What were the goals of Boston Scientific executives in 2006 on the issue of improving quality?
Fred Colen: We took a pause in our new product development efforts in 2006. We consciously said ‘Let’s spend a lot of time and effort in building a new foundation for a higher quality level, then start building on that new foundation. This is costing us a lot of money, but for the most part it’s building a new foundation and then once you have that you can leverage it over time.’ In the first of those two years since I’ve been [with the CRM division] we focused on the quality side, and we put a lot of the people and engineers who were working on the product development side into fortifying this new quality foundation. That was to the tune about 600 people and about $200 million. That was a really focused effort to say, ‘Let’s get through this in the shortest period of time and when we’ve done that, we can go back and focus on product development,’ which we’ve done. So those 600 people are not on the quality side anymore. They’re doing their jobs on the development side, but with the ne
