The healthcare landscape is changing globally and on many levels: regulatory, economic, and technological. With the strong winds of change, entrepreneurs are increasingly required to build their companies into real, sustainable and successful high growth businesses in a much shorter time to stay viable.
Innovation is poised to play a greater role in the evolution of the healthcare market as demographic, regulatory and financial challenges play out. Yet, new product and services concepts often struggle to gain momentum in the larger institutions. Entrepreneurs, in contrast, have the freedom to develop ideas, but are faced with limited resources that can just as easily stifle their innovations.
We increasingly observe that successful companies will need to think of innovation not just in terms of products but in terms of delivering an integrated offering that takes into account cost, service and long-term value to their customers.
The most important trends we are seeing emerging now are toward embedding technology more profoundly in medical treatment and devices – everything gets “smart” and more interconnected. We are going through a period of transition in healthcare driven by regulation, pressure, and demographics and facilitated by technology and innovation. We believe the next decade will prove to be particularly transformative for the delivery of healthcare and will create significant opportunities for bold and visionary entrepreneurs to develop new paradigms and generate incredible value.
So where does Europe sit within the global healthcare landscape? Unfortunately, Europe continues to lag behind the U.S. when it comes to the entrepreneurial stage of innovation and business development; despite the fact that, in much of Europe, regulatory approval processes for new products are more predictable and often faster than in America.
The standout benefit for start-ups in Europe is most certainly the more predictable regulatory approval processes that enable products to access the European market much faster than in other regions. While this is not uniform across the continent, the diversity of market opportunities within Europe enables companies to quickly shift focus to more promising countries or regions.
Europe can be an excellent base for growing healthcare companies and being the eco-system in which they operate. Europe is already developed and robust and has excellent and experienced investors that are willing to take early stage risk, leading clinicians that are pioneering the field, and mature organizations and institutions that are willing to consider new paradigms or technologies that promise to lower costs and improve clinical outcomes. All of these factors contribute to Europe being an excellent base to launch and sustain promising Healthtech companies.
Join us at the 2013 Healthtech Summit on June 25-26 in London to explore these ideas as well as meeting Europe’s 20 most promising Healthtech companies. This year’s Summit with its theme “Crossing the chasm from startup to a sustainable high growth business” is aimed at helping entrepreneurs overcome these important challenges and thinking about building for the long-term. The Healthtech Summit is a space for young companies and resources to meet. We look forward to robust interaction between technology innovators, leaders of the various venture capital groups who invest in healthcare and key players from the industry. And if you are a Eucomed or EDMA member you can receive a 33% discount by registering with the promotional code “Eucomed 33”.
http://www.healthtechsummit.eu/register/register.aspx?events_id=474
– Rudy Mareel and Aris Constantinides, Co-Presidents, 2013 Healthtech Summit
