Historically, innovation has been the domain of research institutions. Extensive multi-disciplined teams, million dollar, multi-year budgets, and unclear endpoints were the norm. Often, cost, time and resource requirements were underestimated.
Innovation projects were typically started by research scientists and engineers without clearly understanding and defining the value proposition that needed to be created to render the result sustainable in our society. Too often, the ultimate customer and the unmet need of that customer was not properly considered and described, resulting in innovative solutions for which nobody was interested in paying.
What was woefully inadequate with these historical approaches? The lack of attention to the identification of the ultimate customer and their associated unmet needs, and how innovation could capitalize on the situation. The other critical ingredient missing was an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial approach to the problem solving and opportunity identification.
Then again, these institutions did not have the benefit of the type of all-encompassing ecosystem that we have today.
Incubators and accelerators are now central to the successful tech transfer and commercialization. As opposed to licensing out medical technology and IP to large multinationals (where control of the innovation is completely removed from the researchers and handed to corporations with their own agendas), researchers are keeping a hand on their work and forming start-up companies - often aided by an experienced entrepreneur. SoundBite, a breakthrough cardiovascular technology originating at the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS), evolved in this manner. Interestingly, UdeS, who originally licensed the IP to the start-up, eventually exchanged ownership of the IP for equity in the company.
Even the tech transfer offices (Aligo, Univalor and Sovar - the three operating in the Quebec MedTech Ecosystem*) are changing their business models to encourage institutional professors and physicians to participate in MedTech start-ups, facilitated by an accelerator such as Centech.
Pierre des Lierres, Director of Business Development at Aligo Innovation, is currently encouraging several researchers and their technologies to explore the business acceleration route at Centech. Nanogenics and OCT are but two of them.
More and more, MedTech innovation emanating from Quebec’s universities and healthcare institutions will be commercialized with these novel and more productive business models!
Non-dilutive funding from from the tech transfer offices as well as federal initiatives such as NSERC, IRAP and IHRC continue to flourish. A recent announcement for $50 million from CDPQ for early stage start-up funding creates an even more compelling ecosystem!.
These are very exciting times!
*A quick post-script on the Ecosystem here in Quebec… It is an ongoing, growing system with many moving parts and players. I’m always looking to improve it - so any omissions here are not intentional, and I welcome any suggestions you might have to improve it and make it even more inclusive. You can add comments below, or through LinkedIn.