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Kilmer Innovations in Packaging Tackles 'Wicked Problems' in Med Device Sterility

KiiP is an industry initiative ‘solving wicked problems in healthcare packaging.’ They’re gathering passionate team members to tackle nebulous topics, ultimately improving patient safety.

The four areas of focus for the programs within KiiP are: The Last 100 Yards, Aseptic Handling, Speeding Things Up, and Sustainability.
The four areas of focus for the programs within KiiP are: The Last 100 Yards, Aseptic Handling, Speeding Things Up, and Sustainability.

Kilmer Innovations in Packaging (or KiiP) is a sterility assurance value chain collaborative effort focused on medical device packaging with the intent of fostering bold, unprecedented innovation. Their slogan is “solving wicked problems in healthcare packaging,” adopting a phrase originally coined by Dr. Laura Bix at a previous HealthPack conference; Dr. Bix brought it back into the conversation as KiiP was being formed. The idea behind KiiP and its slogan is that solutions to these wicked problems will lead to improved patient safety— while enhancing the experience of healthcare workers—among other benefits. 

For a bit of background: The Kilmer Conference is put on by Johnson and Johnson once every three years, and the next is scheduled for 2022. It’s a prestigious, invitation-only event focused on sterility assurance. 

Jennifer Benolken, MDM & regulatory specialist, packaging engineering at DuPont explained that a group of colleagues sat down at the last Kilmer Conference in 2019 and asked how they could get more people at the next conference who are passionate about packaging. What started out as a conversation about socializing the concept of the Kilmer Conference amongst packaging professionals has turned into an industry initiative in the spirit of the Kilmer Conference to collaborate to innovate. They’ve made a lot of progress in the last two and a half years, and it’s blossomed into a KiiP group on LinkedIn of over 300 members who have broken down value chain silos from medical device manufacturers through to the end-user and healthcare professionals.

The four areas of focus for the programs within KiiP are:

  • The Last 100 Yards
  • Aseptic Handling
  • Speeding Things Up
  • Sustainability

Benolken, who leads The Last 100 Yards group, said that the interesting thing about KiiP’s efforts is they require a mindset shift for many participants. Generally, in the medical device industry, there’s a pretty clear target or end state (and process to get there). Whether it’s updating a standard, implementing a new package or machine, etc., there are defined processes, workflows, stage gates and more.


Read article   Read this story on safety in EtO sterilization for medical devices.


This type of innovation is far less straightforward, without a prescribed path to take. It requires participants to be open to questions, without a clear goal... until it emerges. In many ways, it is akin to the research phase of a new product development process—they need to find the problem that needs to be solved before determining how to solve it. It’s far outside a lot of comfort zones but will ultimately lead to important learnings—via failing, pivoting, and finding new wins—to push the industry forward outside of a single company’s constraints. By breaking down silos, the conversations are rich and learning is immense. They are finding that it’s taking time to understand how the same concept is important to others in the value chain–they often are using similar vernacular, but how they are applied and understood are sometimes different. It gets to be a lot to wrap one’s head around.

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