Generational Gatekeeping in Eastern Europe’s MedTech

Why Knowledge Hoarding Persists

What happens when the young generation of professionals starts building? Picture a young Regulatory Professional who built a platform for market compliance over a period of 2 years, only to get his idea rejected by his manager: “We don’t need this”,  “The Seniors already know this by heart”, “Who wants access to this knowledge should learn the hard way, like we all did”.

Generational gatekeeping is a phenomenon manifesting under different formats and has been observed in a majority of the industries. Historically, Eastern Europe’s MedTech ecosystem was built by a generation that survived post-communist transitions; decades of surveillance, scarcity, and the political risk taught people to hoard information for their own safety. An entire generation that learned through hard work and trauma, and in doing so involuntarily undermined young talent while developing deep scepticism towards anyone who hadn’t suffered the same way. 

A study from 2019 by Bilginoğlu, E. on “Knowledge Hoarding” reflects that older professionals don’t primarily hold knowledge to themselves due to insecurity, but due to psychological embedded factors, generated by organisational incentive structures and cultural norms that reward individual achievement over knowledge sharing. In this context, younger professionals are locked out of crucial information needed for their development from an early stage. 

How Young Talent Gets Locked Out

On another occasion, a 29-year-old professional walks into a strategy meeting at a major MedTech company, after he spent the last 3 months developing a new commercial strategy. He starts presenting the solution, the data and the implementation plan. The room is populated by executives in their fifties and sixties, nodding politely while checking their phones. By the time he finishes, the conversation has already moved on to “maybe it’s better to get a proper expert on this”. His insight, ignored. His solution never considered. 

The story is not a metaphor. In fact, it is the daily reality of many top performing individuals across Eastern Europe’s MedTech ecosystem. The challenges faced by young professionals today are often social and deeply personal in nature. Many choose not to voice these experiences, as there comes a point where it becomes clear that competence, qualifications, and factual accuracy alone are not always sufficient in certain professional environments. In this context, dynamics can feel more intense and less forgiving than those typically encountered in Western settings. The truth is that our industry is still shaped by a long shadow of gatekeeping: who is allowed to know, to speak, to lead, and to innovate. 

In 2022, Fasbender & Gerpott published a study on “Knowledge transfer between younger and older employees: a temporal social comparison model”, where few important social aspects were addressed: senior professionals being against documentation while afraid of status loss, younger professionals lacking access to mentorship, and how catastrophic is this context for the organisations. Many of these elements can be identified in MedTech, especially pointing out the catastrophic outcome. 

One year later, Jolles, D., & Lordan, G. in the article “Generational Diversity is on the Rise, and so is Conflict” (2024), shared with us 3 vital elements:

1. Older managers failing to harness the knowledge and skills of younger workers;
2. Younger professionals with older manager are 1.5x times less productive and demotivated;
3. Stereotypes about young people being “lazy/sensitive”, and older being “out of touch” are treated as facts rather than organizational dysfunctions.

The generational gap and the realities were signalled in several publications by scientists studying the phenomenon, by the young generation leading voices and here we are, still living on thin ice. 

The Cost to Innovation and Growth

With a health workforce crisis in the European Union and a systematic underutilisation of emerging talent in Eastern countries, young MedTech innovators across the region face a binary choice between acceptance and departure. The gaps are in several places, from lack of mentorship, intentional selective access to industry knowledge and events, limited access to funding, up to innovation clusters being disconnected. A biomedical engineer in Romania described it: “We’re solving problems that were solved three years ago in Germany, but we don’t know it, we’re not connected. There’s only a few of us who are still building something and we’re all alone.” 

A New Model: Collaborative Approaches in MedTech

In recent years, some young professionals across Eastern Europe have begun experimenting with alternative ways of organising knowledge exchange. The underlying premise is that much of the region’s technical expertise already exists, but access to it can be fragmented or informal.

One example is :breach, a decentralised professional network designed to facilitate collaboration across disciplines. Unlike traditional institutional structures, participation is less dependent on formal hierarchy or geography, and more focused on practical contribution and shared interest.

Its activities include:

• Reverse mentoring initiatives that encourage two-way knowledge exchange
• Webinars and working groups connecting students, researchers, clinicians, and developers
• Small thematic clusters focused on specific technical interests
• An open repository compiling shared insights and professional experiences

Rather than positioning itself as a replacement for established institutions, the ecosystem represents an attempt to complement existing structures by creating additional channels for knowledge sharing and mentorship.

Whether such informal models can address deeper structural barriers remains to be seen. However, they illustrate how some professionals in the region are responding to perceived gaps in access, visibility, and collaboration.

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