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Does Europe have a proper start-up culture? Are we doing enough for young professionals? According to Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, in her article for the World Economic Forum, we could do more to make Europe fertile ground for start-ups, and engage the youngest generation entering the workforce. As a young professional in Brussels well-acquainted with millennial woes, I was eminently interested in the views of an established and influential official at the European Union.

Two years ago in our annual report on the medtech sector, Pulse of the industry, we warned that the sector was facing a perfect storm, caused by a general shift toward value-based care, growing regulatory pressure in the US and limited resources as a result of a global downturn. Those events came to pass, with the added complication of tougher new regulatory issues in Europe. It was time, we felt, in this year’s report to see how the sector is weathering the storm.

It’s increasingly clear that the Medical Technology (MedTech) industry is going through an unprecedented level of change. In Europe, budget pressures are impacting market access and reimbursement. Payers and providers require evidence of value at the clinical and socio-economic level. And buying processes are changing.

Value creation capabilities based solely on R&D investment are not generating as much growth as they used to. According to PwC’s “Operating performance in the Medtech industry: Trends and imperatives” report, which studied the performance of 56 global medtech companies, the impact of R&D on revenue growth declined at an average annual rate of 10% and the return on invested capital declined at a rate of 2% between 2005 and 2011. The impact on growth is evident by revenue growth rates declining at a rate of approximately 12% per year.

Nowadays everyone seems convinced of the clinical benefits that medical technologies, devices and diagnostics, bring to the table. Many even recognise that our innovations bring about considerable socio-economic benefits. And yet, in the end I hear the same thing over and over again: medical technology drives the rise in healthcare expenditure.
EDMA and Eucomed have always refuted this claim and now we have research by the European Health Technology Institute (EHTI) which basically confirms two of our points of view:

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. 

Europe is an important and continuously growing market for medical technology products. Driven by budgetary pressure on the payer and provider levels as well as by strong competitive dynamics, the commercial climate for established medical technology companies is, however, deteriorating. The recent industry survey MedTech Barometer 2011 conducted by us (and with ‘us’, I mean global strategy and marketing consultancy Simon-Kucher & Partners) confirms the presence of increasing commercial challenges but still provides an overall positive short-term business outlook. Yet the longer-term outlook is less positive and suggests that in order to remain successful in the European market place, established players will have to adapt their way of doing business in the future.

Next week, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies will change the way they interact with consumers on Facebook. These changes are occurring, not based on new communications strategies or industry regulations, but because Facebook itself is changing its policies.

In a time when much health industry focus is on the European Commission’s Health Directorate, DG SANCO, EU Commissioner for Research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn chose Covidien’s 20 year celebration of their Galway, Ireland, facility (congratulations to all at Covidien) to emphasise again the value of the Medical Technology industry to Europe and the huge policy and funding support that she and her Directorate, DG Research, provide to the sector.