Innovation Manager at Health Valley Netherlands
Marc Kalf has over 20 years of sales and marketing experience and is an accomplished coach for healthcare start-ups.
Innovation Manager at Health Valley Netherlands
Marc Kalf has over 20 years of sales and marketing experience and is an accomplished coach for healthcare start-ups.
Healthcare is facing pressure from many directions: diminished budgets, increasing demand, aging populations, critical consumers, increasingly personalized treatment, greater focus on prevention and more.
This should not, however, be seen as a threat. Instead, these developments are accelerating innovation. Parties who previously might not have been aware of each other’s existence are joining forces, sharing expertise and resources to create fantastic crossovers, leveraging technologies and data in new ways. Best practices I’ve seen in practice |
I attended Breakthrough Day on November 30, 2017 hosted by Philips HealthWorks, and I saw how joining forces can work in practice. Five enthusiastic health tech start-ups that had developed innovative business solutions, working closely together with large corporate players, knowledge institutes and care providers. The 12-week program they’ve successfully completed shows us that making smart decisions from the outset means a network of collaborators can reach concrete, market-ready results very rapidly indeed. In fact, I personally think this kind of approach actually yields better results than a prolonged program.
By focusing on one specific area — fertility, pregnancy, parenting and neonatal care — program participants could work intensively with a group of medical experts. Not only does this result in deeper understanding, but also a faster transfer of knowledge. In addition, the start-ups are stimulated to exchange ideas, business models and market information.
Not unlike Philips HealthWorks, our organization has two key goals: speeding up healthcare innovation and boosting business activity. Creating partnerships between entrepreneurs and leading corporates is essential to growing the start-up ecosystem that makes this possible. In this way, we contribute to the creation of robust activity and to improving the affordability, accessibility and quality of healthcare. To realize our goals, we are focusing on developing a major network of innovative companies, hospitals and other care institutions, governments and knowledge institutes. By ensuring the success of individual network members and participants, we increase the value of our total network. An adequately functioning network brings support across many business development areas, from financing, grants, IP, legal matters, business development and marketing to personnel management, product development and research.
Making it mutually beneficial To make cooperation in a network successful, however, transparency is vital. Each party has to explain to the other exactly what they expect to get out of the cooperation and what they plan to contribute. Adding value by accessing expertise True innovative strength arises from a combination of demand, knowledge, expertise and funding. Challenges, ideas and knowledge are transformed into concrete technological innovations, new medicines or tools and different ways of working. Today, we’re seeing the development of HealthTech hubs based on this approach, not only in the Netherlands, but also in London, Berlin and Silicon Valley, for example. In each of these locations, parties have understood that ultra-competitive business models are outdated. It’s all about identifying needs and finding out how to get access to the expertise that can help provide a solution and add real value. |
In conclusion: I was impressed with the broad and deep network Philips HealthWorks has put in place and with the commitment from the executive board, which is essential. There really is something beautiful growing in Eindhoven and in the other hubs, where promising start-ups are joining forces with a large technology-driven company like Philips. One key learning from the day I’d like to share — Philips is the first company where CTO means “Cool Technology Officer”!