Most advisory boards are built around a version of the same question: who do we know, and who can we get?
It’s understandable. There’s time pressure, budget pressure and the comfort of familiar names. You know the relationship works. You know they’ll show up. You have a reasonable sense of what they’ll say.
That last part is the problem.
The Confirmation Trap
When we were asked to design a scientific advisory board for Hasa Optix, one of the company’s first instincts was the same instinct most companies have: start with the clinicians they already know.
And those relationships matter. We’re not dismissing them. But an advisory board built entirely around existing contacts tends to produce a particular kind of output, not necessarily wrong, but shaped by a set of assumptions that have already been validated by the relationship itself.
Hasa Optix had a specific positioning they wanted to test: precision, reusability and responsible design. These are real differentiators in the cataract surgery market, and the company genuinely believes in them. But they needed to know whether those messages hold up when a clinician is deciding what to put in their theatre kit on a busy Monday, working under cost constraints, competing sustainability commitments and a procurement team with its own views.
That kind of honest pressure test requires voices that aren’t already on your side.
Designing for Challenge, Not Comfort
The advisory board we built for Hasa Optix was ten people, all from Europe, all with genuine clinical credibility in ophthalmology. But the selection logic was built around archetypes, not a contact list.
We asked: what type of insight does this project actually need?
For the sustainability positioning, we needed a clinician who wasn’t a routine user of Hasa Optix products. Not as a token sceptic, but as someone who could engage with the responsible design argument from a position of genuine independence. Dr Diana Silva fits that profile exactly. She’s Co-chair of the EyeSustain Global Council, she has led practical waste-reduction programmes in her own retina practice, and her department’s existing policy already favours reusable instruments. She came into the room with no particular reason to be sold.
That’s not a hostile voice. It’s an honest one.
For the high-volume, in-theatre reality check, we chose Dr Vincent Qin, a Belgian surgeon who uses Hasa Optix instruments in high-throughput settings and has done so in resource-constrained environments including humanitarian surgical work. He could speak to how the products actually perform under pressure, not just under ideal conditions.
Prof. Filomena Ribeiro, Past President of the ESCRS, brought the kind of academic weight that makes outputs externally credible. Her thinking spans clinical practice, research and professional society leadership. She can connect an advisory board discussion to a white paper to a broader industry narrative in a way that most clinicians can’t.
And Dr Sjoerd Elferink brought something different again: an emerging voice, not yet shaped by years of industry engagement. Clinicians at that career stage tend to be more candid. They haven’t learned to moderate their views in the way more established figures sometimes do. That candour is genuinely useful if you want to understand where your positioning works and where it doesn’t.
The Moderator Question
One of the decisions that matters most in any advisory board is the choice of moderator, and it’s one that often gets less attention than it deserves.
The temptation is to use someone from within the company or someone very senior and very visible. Both can work. But the best moderators for this type of board have a specific combination of qualities: genuine clinical credibility, the ability to facilitate rather than lead, and enough independence from the company to give participants confidence that the discussion is real.
Miss Radhika Rampat, who moderated the Hasa Optix board, is familiar with their instrumentation. But she wasn’t chosen because she’s an advocate. She was chosen because she can manage a room full of strong clinical opinions, draw out the quieter voices, spot when a conversation is going in circles and redirect it, and synthesise what’s been said into something usable.
The goal of a moderator isn’t to get everyone to agree. It’s to make sure the conversation produces something you can act on.
What Came Out of It
The discussion generated four types of output that Hasa Optix can use: strategic clarity on where their positioning lands and where the gaps are, content assets including soundbites for external use, a foundation for a white paper, and new clinical relationships that didn’t exist before the board met.
That last point is worth dwelling on. The relationships built through a well-run advisory board have value beyond the event itself. Several of the clinicians Hasa Optix met through this process were genuinely new to them. Those relationships now exist. That’s a different kind of return on investment from a standard KOL engagement.
For a small marketing team without a large internal medical affairs function, that breadth of output from a single project is what efficient, well-designed engagement looks like.
Read the case study for more information >
The Broader Point
Advisory boards fail for predictable reasons: familiar names, generic questions, no clear purpose, no structure for turning conversation into outputs.
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require a different starting point. Ask “what do we need to learn, and who is best placed to challenge us on it?” rather than “who can we get?” Those are different questions and they produce very different rooms.
Including clinicians who haven’t used your product, who operate in different systems, who are earlier in their careers or who come from adjacent subspecialties isn’t about being difficult. It’s about getting information that’s actually worth having.
If your last advisory board produced exactly the feedback you expected, that’s worth thinking about.
Ready to Build an Advisory Board That Challenges You?
ArtiaCo. designs and manages expert engagement for life sciences companies. If you’re planning an advisory board and want it to do more than confirm what you already think, get in touch.
hello@theartiaco.com | theartiaco.com
