Medtech Commercialization Requires Belief

In the medical device industry, belief, trust, and confidence in your device, your team, and your vision are not easy to gain, yet they’re necessary for commercialization—across all stakeholders.

In Geoffrey Moore’s classic marketing book Crossing the Chasm, one of the most cited frameworks in medtech commercialization, he illuminated the gap that lies between the early, enthusiastic adopters of an innovation and mainstream customers. To cross the Chasm, you must persuade what Moore calls the early majority—a risk- and change-averse group—to believe in it to achieve widespread product adoption.[MF2.1][EC2.2] But we rarely examine what actually happens in the Chasm from a psychological standpoint—and that omission is costly to medtech founders.

Meanwhile, the Belief Gap lies between the quality of your innovation and your ability to inspire genuine belief—the emotional conviction that drives action—in every stakeholder who matters. Your innovation and its potential sit on one side of the Belief Gap, and the stakeholders you need sit on the other. Your evidence is essential in closing the Belief Gap. Yet it only informs belief; it doesn’t replace it.

Throughout this piece, "belief" refers to the full spectrum of conviction a stakeholder needs to act, including trust and confidence, not simply intellectual agreement with the evidence.

How can understanding the Belief Gap help you move beyond early adopters and gain the belief of the early majority, a more skeptical group of stakeholders? This article explores how closing the Belief Gap can help medtech innovators attract more investors, persuade clinicians, and move into commercialization.

Evidence Informs Belief, But Doesn't Guarantee It

Moore's framework was designed for the commercialization phase—the transition from early adopters to the early majority, the group that marks the start of the mainstream market. By then, your device is proven; you have clinical data and regulatory clearance. Those early adopters have used your product and they or their patients have benefited. This next group, the early majority, isn't being asked to take a leap of faith—they're being asked to evaluate evidence that already exists. But the early majority has even less tolerance for uncertainty than the stakeholders you sought earlier; they want proof of inevitability. Beyond proof, they need belief.

The need to drive belief and escape Moore’s Chasm is especially relevant at the early commercial launch. That's the window when founders ask a wide range of stakeholders to believe, even though the innovation is genuinely real, but the evidence is still accumulating. In that moment, the emotion of your conviction has to carry some of the weight that certainty hasn't yet earned.

The psychological mechanics of the Belief Gap explain why so many medtech companies stall at precisely this moment, when the technology is ready to scale. Unfortunately, your credibility does not equal believability. The challenge is that the way you’ve successfully approached product development—by taking risks and trying new things—leaves stakeholders nervous. The “Just Might” energy that got you here doesn’t generate belief, even when paired with evidence. In the Chasm between early adopters and the early majority, you must speak to stakeholders in the language of “Just Mighty”—with confidence, certainty, and clarity.

This stems from brain science. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's research on cognition shows that System 1, the brain's automatic, unconscious, pattern-matching mode of thinking, forms belief in milliseconds, based on intuition, emotion, and accumulated experience, well before conscious analysis begins.

Dr. Errol Norwitz is Executive Director of the Kerry Murphy Healey Center for Health Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Babson College, and Professor and past Chief Scientific Officer and Chair of OB/GYN at Tufts Medical Center/Tufts University School of Medicine. In an interview for this paper, he observes that “People make decisions based on emotion. It’s one thing to show data, but a compelling story will help put the problem in context and can be even more impactful.”

Your strategy and communications must be up to the task to earn stakeholder belief and continue to carry your innovation forward.

But here's where it gets interesting: the Belief Gap persists beyond early launch and the early majority, through full commercialization and even post-commercialization, when innovators have substantial evidence. Evidence informs belief. It never replaces belief. This is true at every stage and for every type of stakeholder. To succeed, medtech innovators must keep addressing the Belief Gap by communicating strategically in ways that build belief among stakeholders.

Stakeholders at the Chasm

Various types of stakeholders need to believe, trust, and feel confident in your product for it to move from early adopters to early majority. A physician who has seen the trial data still must trust that the learning curve is manageable and feel confident they won't face pushback from peers about changes to workflow or professional judgment for being an early adopter. They must also believe that your company will be around to support them long-term. The evidence you can share with them addresses the science. Trust and confidence address the concerns that go beyond the facts and stem from their emotions and past experiences. Dr. Errol Norwitz observes that clinicians are "inherently very conservative, very reluctant to change. This medical conservatism is well justified—if clinicians fail, patients can die." Still, if you can demonstrate benefits to patients over the standard of care and show that it will simplify their workflow, you can build the confidence needed to overcome their skepticism.

Hospital leadership evaluating a proven device still must believe that it will work in their specific environment, with their specific patient population, and within their specific budget constraints. The clinical data proves it worked somewhere. Belief is still required to bridge the gap between the evidence you provide to hospital execs and the decisions they're making about their specific organization. Dr. Norwitz notes, “If your product can improve workflow, or solve a supply chain challenge, that will help. Also, if you can improve metrics that are part of hospital mandates, like hospital readmissions, or listed in their value-based care contracts, or create efficiencies in high-value service lines like operating rooms or the emergency department, then you can get the CFO on board.”

A payer evaluating reimbursement for your product must still believe that real-world outcomes will justify the cost. Even when trials show efficacy, the payer will make decisions based on more than clinical data. The evidence you present to them informs their belief but doesn't create it.

A patient, as the end user, still must believe your product won’t just work for those who participated in trials or were early adopters. They must believe that what you’re promising will actually address their unmet need and, importantly, that they will be physically capable of using the product. They want to believe you have the solution; you must not only provide proof but also address their concerns and desires.

Belief is Always Necessary

As we’ve explored throughout this series, science supports the idea that belief turns evidence into a decision—at every stage, for every stakeholder. This is supported not only by Moore's framework but also by that of researchers Antonio Damasio, Antoine Bechara, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. McCormick says, “As believers, we're not simply information processors; we're doing a whole lot more.” People trust experts, but belief is “beyond reason; it is something that we're more comfortable thinking about as emotional, as a kind of feeling. But that feeling isn’t taking you away from the truth or from rationality. It's a facet of it.”

The ratio of belief to evidence may shift as you move through the lifecycle stages of your medtech product and your evidence increases, but belief remains a constant need. In the early stages, belief does most of the heavy lifting as you must persuade stakeholders to support you. As you gather more data, it does more of the work—but belief is still the final step that converts evidence into action. The emotional state in which stakeholders make decisions never disappears; it just has more evidence to work with as you continue to gather data from the use of your device.

Belief remains crucial for the stakeholders you need throughout a device's lifecycle. Even post-commercialization, even with a fully proven device, the Belief Gap never completely disappears. It changes form at each stage, and you must change how you approach your stakeholders as you move through the stages. When you need to persuade the early majority to get on board, are you leveraging your knowledge of the Belief Gap to escape the Chasm?

About Dr. Errol Norwitz

After 15 years in leadership roles at industry leaders including Stryker, Philips, and Johnson & Johnson, Ilana Lam Gotlib founded ILG Consulting, LLC with a focused mission: helping healthcare innovators tell their stories. She brings a deep conviction that even the most brilliant technologies can get lost without a clear narrative — and built her firm to be the strategic partner she always valued, one who can cut through complexity, find the "hook," and prepare teams for their biggest moments. Whether refining an investor pitch, structuring a strategic partnership, or navigating a growth hurdle, she works as an extension of her clients' teams, combining the rigor of a corporate background with the agility and personal attention that startups deserve — ensuring they are Pitch Ready, Growth Ready, and Partner Ready.

References

1. David Rutledge, D. (Host). (2025, May 22). Belief, emotion and trust. The Philosopher’s Zone. ABC Radio National. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/belief-emotion-and-trust/105281060

2. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.