Match Made in HealthTech Heaven: A Tale of the Corporate and Startup

Meeting the gaps in healthcare is a constant struggle in the Asia healthcare scene. With the rapid aging population, increasing rate of chronic diseases, rising costs in Asia, ensuring an integrated healthcare system is paramount to efficiency in operations [1]. Nonetheless, problems in managing the demand for and supply of staff quantity, access to resources, treatment costs persist in healthcare organizations [2].

Addressing the unmet needs in healthcare require resources, collaborations, and more notably technological advancements to provide quality healthcare for patients. This is when MedTech comes into the picture, serving as a bridge to resolving the unmet needs. Predominantly, innovations are prevalent in the areas of disease knowledge, diagnostics, detection, screenings, remote monitoring, disease tracking, predictive analytics.

Over the years, healthcare organizations are increasingly becoming more inclined to collaborate with startups in the MedTech industry, due to their nature of agility, speed of product innovations, tech capability, product market fit. If executed well, it can create positive impact and value in the areas of clinical & patient experience, clinical workflow efficiency and more importantly improvements to the healthcare system [3].

However, striking a balance between the business needs of large corporations, and the limits of startups is a perpetual challenge. Working together comes with potential pitfalls, and both parties need to ensure mutual understanding to ensure a successful collaboration.

Tips to Collaborate With Startups

Ensure Common Interests: Corporates need to have the mindset of investing and committing for the long term. While working with startups can help to solve business problems, they are certainly a high risk, high return investment. Corporates need to ensure they know what they are getting into; that investment do not always necessarily guarantee a return in the short term, as the nature of startups existence is to test and solve the unknown.

Set Expectations: It is essential for corporates to have clear long-term strategic intent, set clear expectations before starting to work with startups, and be transparent. Often, startups find difficulty navigating around the corporate structure and hierarchical systems, sometimes losing their startup spirit during the work process. Corporates should treat partnership with startups as unique and not like any other business line in the company and be fluid in the decision-making process.

Choose The Right Team: Startup investors always preach “invest in the people, not the idea”. Similarly, corporates need to pick the right people to spearhead the collaboration with the startups. Those people need to have the entrepreneurial drive, be forward thinking and eliminate the biases of working with startups to drive a successful collaboration.

How To Kickstart Collaboration With Startups?

• Speak to stakeholders who are involved or have experience working with startups to get practical tips on collaboration
• Find opportunities to meet startup founders at events to discuss opportunities for partnerships
• Start small! If you are uncertain of the benefits, start with a small kickoff project first then scale (i.e. hackathon, small scale pilot, proof of concept)

5 MedTech Startups In Focus At Asia Healthcare Week 2020

Informa Connect Singapore has carefully reviewed and selected 5 MedTech startups to pitch at the upcoming Asia Healthcare Week from 2-3 September 2020 at One Farrer Hotel, Singapore. An event encompassing 3 co-located conferences, this event will provide a platform to meet all healthcare stakeholders across Asia and hear innovative product ideas from the startup founders.

Find out more

Co-locating three 3 conferences which will cover the financing, healthcare facility and digital tech aspects of expanding the affordability and accessibility of healthcare, Informa Connect’s 6th Asia Healthcare Week returns better and rejuvenated. This umbrella event spans three co-located conferences that will address a wide variety of aspects regarding the direction of healthcare and what it takes to revamp and prepare healthcare businesses for emerging priorities in the sector.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6298881/
[2] https://e27.co/12-medtech-startups-know-youre-asia-20161121/
[3] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/Life-Sciences-Health-Care/gx-lshc-medtech-iomt-brochure.pdf

Other references:
http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_Collaboration_between_Start-ups_and_Corporates.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/futurium/en/system/files/ged/43-nesta-winning-together-guidestartupcollab.pdf