Ronald A. Matricaria:
Transcript of Interview Excerpt
Ronald Matricaria, interviewed by Kirk Jeffrey on April 21, 2000 in Little Canada, Minnesota.
“Actually, I didn’t know it was coming. We had no idea it was coming. What happened was that in late 1993, early ‘94, we finished our strategic plan. Basically what we did is, for lack of a better, broader way, we said, “We are a medical device company.” I said to our people doing the future strategic planning, “Don’t venture outside of medical devices right now. Contain the focus and direction. Tell us what we could be in the medical device arena.”
I think at the time, the market was $70 or $80 billion in size, and we were only one little piece of it called the heart valve. Actually we were even smaller than that, with only a mechanical heart valve. So we analyzed the marketplace and said, “Where do we have core competencies as a company that we can transition this company into other opportunities within the medical device business?” We actually broke up this $80 billion market into sixteen or seventeen different slices, and we built an analytical model to create shareholder value that we could test on analysis and say, “Gee, if we could be in here, could we create some shareholder value?”
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