Keep your entrepreneurship ideas simple and work together, says Dr. Wijay
Dr. Bandula Wijay.
Keep your million-dollar idea, which will transform the world, simple. This is the sage advice Dr. Bandula Wijay, one of Sri Lanka’s most eminent inventors of medical devices, had to offer aspiring students from the Universities of Moratuwa and the Colombo Medical College hell-bent on becoming the new wave of entrepreneurs.
With stars in their eyes, they listened to Dr. Wijay, the keynote speaker at Tech Talk, the flagship event of the Computer Society of Sri Lanka, in Colombo. Usually this is held only for its membership, but with Dr. Wijay making one of his trips to his roots – from his home in Houston, US – it was felt the opportunity should not be missed to get some words of advice from him.
Prabath Wickramaratne, President of the Computer Society, introduced his guest from the US as an “inventor, engineer, scientist, educator and entrepreneur.” The list goes on and Mr.Wickramaratne said he had to cut short his introduction due to time restraints and the fact that most of the audience was keen to listen to what Dr. Wijay, the entrepreneur, had to say.
“If you want to be successful and build a company, then your idea does not have to be complicated. Just look at two of the biggest companies today, Amazon and Uber, for instance. Amazon sells somebody else’s products. Uber does not own a single car. Yet both are among the biggest companies in the world today,” Dr. Wijay pointed out.
If Houston, ever really did say “we have a problem” in the medical field, then the man they would have to would have been Dr. Wijay. An expert in the field of cardiovascular device development, the serial entrepreneur has developed a number of medical devices used commonly today in heart surgery.
His inventions are used in balloon angioplasty in high-risk patients, he has worked in developing angiography catheters, cardiac output measurement catheters and localised drug infusion devices. He was also the pioneer of the present-day vascular stents.
The heart is not the only area he has focused on, he has also developed devices used for female sterilisation procedures and a whole host of medical treatment concepts at an adjunct facility in bio-engineering at the University of Houston.
With more than 30 medical devices patented and founder of four medical device companies since 1984, Dr. Wijay is well-qualified to talk to the audience littered with young minds all wanting to know how to turn an idea into a commercial hit.
“The best (way) to go ahead is to find a solution so simple for a need that is so severe. For this, you have to identify the problem. So, the problem is to identify the problem,” Dr. Wijay says.
An old-boy of Mahinda College, Dr. Wijay struck the jackpot when he created, or streamlined the balloon angioplasty and pioneered vascular stents. From the days when bypass surgery involved sawing open your rib cage to get to your heart, now all a patient had to undergo was mild discomfort in undergoing angioplasty and where he or she can leave hospital after an overnight stay.
“You need vision, inspiration, an idea and creativity,” offers Dr. Wijay. He points out, quite rightly that people who don’t have a vision are blind. “We also need an innovative culture. In the ancient days, Sri Lanka had one of the most innovative cultures but down the years we have lost it. I blame the British for that. We became servants.
“To have an innovative culture we need to have an education system where deductive and critical thinking are the norm as this will increase our ability to solve a problem.
“But most important of all is that as a nation, we need to learn to collaborate. In the US it is not a problem. Doctors and engineers will collaborate on one problem. People of many backgrounds come together for the common good. But here in Sri Lanka, they will want money if they give any advice.
“We have to eliminate boundaries. There should be no lines where you say you are an engineer so you don’t know anything about the medical field. People from different backgrounds have to come together to provide the solution,” Dr. Wijay added.
His words seemed a panacea for this country’s ills.