Why this program?

The Medical Solutions Accelerator will allow you to validate your medical product or service based on technology, product innovation services, end-user input and medical expertise. During this program you’ll increase your chances to launch a valuable and successful medical solution, validated by user and patient experience in clinical testing.

What to expect?

This fall you can be one of the 10 start-ups that get the opportunity to pitch and validate their innovative idea with coaches from BlueHealth, UAntwerpen, UZA and Verhaert. The 3-month program consists of 5 workshops to:

• Access state-of-the-art technologies
• Validate your solution with end-user
• Find the right funding opportunities
• Understand current IP & medical regulations
• Design your business model & value proposition

Join the Medical Solutions Accelerator

Are you the ambitious start-up we’re looking for? Don’t miss out on this exciting opportunity to boost your innovative idea. Visit the Medical Solutions Accelerator website for more information and application.

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Defining scale-ups

Before we start we have to share the definition for a scale-up utilized: “Having achieved 3 consecutive years with at least 20% growth starting from 10 employees in the first year.” Some definitions add that a revenue of 5 million should be achieved by the 5^th year, but this is somewhat limiting for Deep Tech startups, hence why we don’t use this. Another way to summarize or depict the value of scale-ups is by the World Economic Forum’s quote:

“Although not all startups make it big, the ones that do greatly impact society by means of new technology, services and increased employment.”

Analyzing the challenge

One of the biggest challenges facing scale-ups is the need to access new markets and acquire new customers to maintain growth momentum. Whether they are trying to expand into new local markets or across Europe, there are many obstacles to consider such as increased financial risk, logistics, regulatory issues and potentially employees (the brownfield vs. greenfield question).

This is backed by research outlining that most start-ups who have the ambition to become scale-ups face difficulties in

• • understanding the complex procurement processes
  • finding opportunities to bid for governments and large corporations
  • scaling and changing marketing and sales processes in order to enable expansion.

Looking at the current trend of believing everything can be digitally performed, this is a challenge that should not be ignored. Nothing trumps a good face-to-face client meeting in each other’s offices. Cultural differences, methods and activities may not differ on a first glance, but spending time with each other highlights the differences and is the first road to create a mutual understanding.

Tackling the market gap

We suggest looking beyond the set-up of a new office, in 3 steps. Each complementary to the other, but ensuring your fastest way to success. First have champions of your organization embed themselves in the new market space for a short period of time, taking a deep dive to identify the local differences. Secondly, you should involve local partners with the help of your regional public agency, helping you attract foreign direct investment to get first foothold in the local industry. The third step is taking part in open and collaborative innovation workshops and acceleration programs to capture insights and learnings from people who have been there and discuss those with peers. These tailored workshops guide you towards the ideal market and customer base. The right acceleration program will introduce you into the right ecosystem to build on your own network.

For instance, through our thematic accelerator program Point.IoT the winners gained connections with European agencies for continued capability development and funding.

We’re eager to hear your learnings and what steps you took to overcome the difficulties when entering into a new market space.

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Launching valuable & successful medical solutions

The life sciences industry has made astonishing advances over the years, but there are still many problems that require innovative solutions. Nevertheless, launching a valuable and successful medical solution is no walk in the park. You need to overcome obstacles in consumer acceptance, funding, regulations, IP, product-market fit and business model design.

Connecting with flourishing medical ecosystems

To overcome the industry-specific criteria and challenges, you need to connect with flourishing medical ecosystems. During the Medical Solutions Accelerator kick-off and network event we want to celebrate the successes and build on the learnings of the Medical Solutions Accelerator participants and other successful medical entrepreneurs.

What can you expect? The event starts with a short inspirational lecture and panel discussion in which you’ll learn new insights on the health innovation paradox and how to disrupt the innovation in the medical world. During the following networking segment, you’ll meet medical entrepreneurs, investors, local governments, medical institutions, and specifically the Medical Solutions Accelerator alumni.

Interested in attending the Medical Solutions Accelerator kick-off and network event? Visit the event page to register or find more information about the program.

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The CASSINI Hackathons and Mentoring, initiated by the European Union and its space program, is a series of 6 hackathons that tackle global challenges using European space technologies. Now in its 3rd edition, this hackathon provides access to European space data, information and signals from Copernicus, Galileo and EGNOS, plus other valuable tools to help participants take on one of our three pressing challenges. The top ideas will be awarded at both local and EU levels, and the overall winners will enter a 6-month mentoring program that includes 100 hours of customized expert mentoring.

Here’s what to expect

If you’re a rising innovator in Europe, you’re invited to participate in the CASSINI Hackathon at one of our 10 locations. Each hackathon location features its own unique set of experts, prizes, and additional special features. Once you select a location, it’s time for registration, team formation and ideation! Your team will choose to solve one of three challenges, all related to the theme of European tourism:

1. Creating sustainable destinations: Develop innovative ideas or design new products or services that reduce the carbon footprint of tourism travel. For this challenge, participants are encouraged to explore the areas of carbon footprint measurement, alternative destinations or modes of transport, online travel agents and other intermediaries, disruptive travel concepts, and understanding travel patterns between cities or countries.
2. Experiencing lesser-known cities and cultures: Develop innovative ideas or design new products or services to offer travelers a unique and sustainable way to experience local destinations while supporting local businesses and communities. For this challenge, participants are encouraged to explore the areas of crowd management and slow tourism, personal recommendations and itineraries, social recognition and social media, state-of-the-art virtual travel experiences, and supporting local businesses and communities.
3. Exploring nature with care: Develop innovative ideas or design new products or services to offer tourists a unique and sustainable opportunity to explore our nature. For this challenge, participants are encouraged to explore the areas of conservation of local nature and biodiversity, social recognition, and social media, supporting local businesses and communities, the generation of (new) routes and points of interest, and tourist information about the environmental state of areas.

Get your spot

Remember, no previous space experience is required! This is your chance to engage with the sector, even if it’s for the first time. The application process couldn’t be easier: simply choose a challenge and decide how you’ll leverage EU space technologies to reshape European tourism. Register here: hackathons.cassini.eu

Hackers aren’t the only ones who can take advantage of the CASSINI Hackathons & Mentoring. If you’d like to participate as an organizer or mentor, we’d love to hear from you. All interested individuals, organisations, companies, and institutions are invited to apply to support the next generation of space-based entrepreneurs. Information on how to get involved can be found here for mentors and organizers.

Now is your chance to become part of this exciting European initiative to promote EU Space technology and its many applications. Hack with a purpose and leverage EU space data, services, and signals to strengthen and transform the way Europe does tourism! More information: hackathons.cassini.eu

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Cryptocurrency hardware wallet

NGRAVE, founded in 2018, develops a secure and easy to use cryptocurrency hardware wallet. This 3-tier solution, ‘Coldest Wallet’, consists of an offline touchscreen hardware wallet (ZERO), an encrypted backup solution (GRAPHENE) and a mobile app to connect to the blockchain (LIQUID).

Ruben Merre, CEO and cofounder of NGRAVE explains: “Having experienced crypto hacks ourselves, we made it our mission to provide the crypto community the security comfort it deserves. That’s why we innovated to the extreme on both security and user experience. This seed round represents the kickstart for our exponential growth stage and with the backing of several strategic investors, we are confident that 2022 will be a breakthrough year for NGRAVE.”

Expanding the team & global reach

After the successful seed round fundraise, NGRAVE is now looking to expand their team and increase global reach. By doing so, it wants to solidify its global brand and presence. In addition, NGRAVE is planning a new significant funding round in 2022 to support its vision of creating a complete crypto ecosystem.

At Verhaert, we support start-ups to make sure they have a success launch. Within our MyStartup program, you can enter many incubator programs to help overcome current challenges.

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Start-ups pitch innovative solutions

At the end of September seven start-ups started the Medical Solutions Accelerator. During the pitching day that followed, they each presented their innovative idea to a jury of experts in medical product development and investors. The jury assessed the start-ups based on their product or service, action plan and the competences within the team.

A-Sense Lab was named winner of the accelerator thanks to their strong concept, plan and team. This start-up develops a new, pioneering photo-electrochemical detection technology for biomarkers in cancer research. These markers are important for cancer diagnosis, treatment and follow up.

“At the start of this accelerator, we mainly focused on the detection technology. During the workshop we could develop the underlying concept, plan for the future, map stakeholders and their needs. This way we can start building a groundbreaking platform for cancer diagnosis and follow-up based on photo-electrochemical biomarkers. This will make the treatment process faster, easier and less expensive,” Elise Daems, Sara Melis and Simone Bassini from A-Sense Lab, managed by professor Karolien De Wael.

Guidance by medical, R&D and technology

The Medical Solutions Accelerator is an initiative of the city of Antwerpen, UAntwerpen, UZA and Verhaert to stimulate Antwerp entrepreneurship and medical innovation. During six intense workshops and coaching sessions, the teams were structurally guided and challenged to finetune their product or service, and to consider their value proposition, users and potential market. The unique combination of experts in medical innovation, product development and clinical research gave them a new perspective on their challenges and necessary insights to tackle them

“We’ve seen the start-ups grow enormously in the last three months. The pitching day showed that these teams are ready to start looking for investors and roll out their action plan. These disruptive innovations are poised to shake up the medical landscape,” says An-Katrien Huijghebaert, coordinator Medical Solutions Accelerator for Verhaert.

Connect with the coaches & start-ups

Keeping an eye on new players in the medical and healthcare market can help your company to stay on top. Interested to connect with the coaches from this accelerator program and its start-ups? Leave your details below!

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How can you benefit from the CASSINI initiative? With CASSINI, the European Commission wants to stimulate innovative initiatives and put data and information from Copernicus satellite images and Galileo and EGNOS positioning signals back on the map. In this video, Pieter Deleye, Business Development Services – Strategic Innovation at Verhaert, interviews Tomas Jonsson, CASSINI Space Entrepreneurship Initiative at European Commission, to highlight its benefits and opportunities for young entrepreneurs.

Want to find your ideal incubator? Visit our MyStartup Incubator page.

Watch the recording

View the presentation

 

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Investor matchmaking is common practice, however we notice that many capital resources are underexplored and start-ups often lack readiness, even though they have only one chance to make a first good impression. Our insights are based on the vast experience of our team and supported with research from third parties. Our innovative approach for the CASSINI Matchmaking is entirely based upon these insights in order to make this action an unprecedented success.

Culture shift from closed innovation to open innovation became a fact, matchmaking is trending

In an ever-changing global economy, reach, access and innovation are among the assets that support a company’s success. Developing cutting-edge products and services, and getting them in front of the right customers is key to business success.

Innovation comes in different flavors. Corporates have always been active in incremental innovation of their products and systems – often making use of new technological evolutions – to improve their core value propositions. While core innovation is an essential activity for companies to be successful, for most it demands a disproportional effort to obtain significant (technical) improvements on the performance of their products and systems. Obviously, the high maturity level of technologies used, and the fact other players are adopting these technologies as well – hence reaching similar performance levels – make it difficult to obtain a unique, sustainable competitive advantage. Nonetheless, incremental innovations remain important to sustain a company’s cash cows (revenue generating value propositions). These research and development activities are typically done in house.

In order to generate adjacent and breakthrough innovations, companies have started to look outside their corporate environment as well. Following PwC’s Innovation Benchmark from 2017 that surveyed over 1.200 executives in 44 countries, already 61% of companies embraced open innovation to generate new ideas and 55% adopted co-creation with customers, partners, and suppliers. Further, about a third of the surveyed leaders indicated that technology drives their innovation roadmap; half of them experiment with and adopt emerging technology platforms to create breakthrough innovations. Of course, this complicates the innovation projects ahead as new technology development, application development and market development must be executed concurrently. These new innovations deliver an extension of the existing value propositions, hence create new opportunities for growth.

Investor backed or corporate backed start-ups are on the rise, but unfortunately lack ability to scale

According to McKinsey, only one in five market incumbents (existing industry players) succeed in scaling their new business initiatives after their initial success. Also, in the world of start-ups where only one in two hundred become actual scale-ups according to the Growth Institute, scaling is considered a fundamental challenge. In general, these are discouraging failure rates. But does it have to be that way?

Probably not. Two-thirds of all value creation is achieved through scale-ups according to McKinsey’s research. While most companies focus on setting up new businesses, the payoff is found in the ability to scale. Based on an analysis of US venture capital data, two-thirds of value is created when a company can penetrate a target market and capture a significant portion of that market as illustrated above. VC firms have a clear understanding of that value. Of the $135 billion invested by US VC firms in 2018, 63% was deployed to enable successful start-ups to scale their product or service (series C funding and later). Any scaling venture is the product of an investment or partnership resulting from a successful match. Among the start-ups that successfully built a product and completed at least series B funding, only 22% succeed at scaling independently, says the McKinsey study. Following the same research another 27% are absorbed at some point through an M&A transaction with a corporate partner and are successful. Early partnerships with corporates are therefore often vital because they create a pathway for more intensive collaboration or an M&A transaction. About 51% manage to sustain themselves but cannot scale, or they just die off.

This challenge is particularly important for the European Earth Observation (EO) industry. According to the 2019 Copernicus Market Report, 30% of the EO companies in Europe are considered small, even 66% are reckoned micro. We should create more unicorns from the vast pool of EO SME landscape and matchmaking with corporates is a proven tactic.

While there’s less data publicly available about the success of corporate-backed ventures, we observe similar patterns there as well. Many corporates operate “innovation factories” to launch new businesses, but few of them ever become a sizable new business unit of the parent. At Verhaert, we operate multiple of these innovation factories, helping our clients to achieve a better result. And we succeed in that. Even though the results are a bit better with investor backed ventures, both venture models (corporate innovation factories and investor backed start-ups or SMEs) seem to have difficulties in setting up a sustainable growth business.

This inhibits the success of matchmaking events significantly. All stakeholders have had disappointing experiences in the past. In particular, larger scaled events with the goal to set up industry matchmaking have delivered dispiriting results. We’ve done a thorough analysis of the causes behind this and thought deeply on how to resolve them in the view of the New Space ecosystem action.

Download the perspective to continue reading on how matchmaking between industry and start-ups needs adequate collaboration operandi

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Why is it so important to support innovative start-ups?

“Nobody doubts the importance of innovation. It’s increasingly seen as the solution to just about every social problem. However, innovating isn’t easy. In fact, the success rate of innovation is statistically rather low. As a service provider, we therefore help companies and entrepreneurs to innovate successfully by taking a systematic approach. We do this extensively with corporations for both their core innovations and for developing adjacent products and new product lines. In addition, we support disruptive innovations that typically challenge the rules of a particular sector. That kind of innovation is best done in a start-up setting.”

What exactly does Verhaert do in that context?

“We launched the ‘MyStartUp initiative’ about four years ago. With this, we support start-ups all over Europe in their very first phase, that is conceptualizing and realizing a proof of concept, both on a technical and commercial level. We do this in the form of various local and international thematic incubation and acceleration programs, and in partnership with various European, Belgian and Flemish initiatives. More information about these thematic programs can be found at mystartup.be.”

“Specifically, we coach start-ups in data, medical and IoT applications and space technology to help them to receive government support. Moreover, we provide access to our engineering services at a discount rate. In this way, we have already helped about five hundred start-ups from Finland to Greece get off to a good start in recent years. So we can surely say that we are successful at this.”

The need for support does not end for start-ups after realizing a proof of concept.

Why did you choose to also collaborate with imec.istart?

“The need for support does not end for start-ups after realizing a proof of concept. To take the next steps in further developing and launching their product, they need venture capital and additional substantive guidance. Verhaert also wants to give substance to this. Preferably, we do not do this by investing directly ourselves, because that could lead to conflicts of interest. We therefore chose to collaborate with the imec.istart fund based on their proven track record as a leading business acceleration program and more than two hundred participants, their sector independence, and the corresponding market approach and complementarity in coaching towards business and product readiness.”

What type of start-ups do you specifically target with this?

“We focus our fund on young technology companies, but our substantive contribution is strongest in start-ups with a hybrid proposition with both a physical product and software. We have seen this type of company emerge more and more frequently at imec.istart in recent years because of the rise of IoT. Consequently, the fund broadened from software technology ventures to deep technology ventures. These ventures involve more physical products and therefore more substantial R&D and product development. Start-ups with concepts in IoT, life sciences and even space often need a hardware component and guidance in product innovation.”

How do Verhaert and imec.istart complement each other?

“The guidance of this type of start-up requires specific expertise. In this respect, the collaboration between imec.istart and Verhaert is an enormous added value. After all, we specialize in hardware and hybrid systems, while imec.istart focuses more on digital and micro-electronics. We provide a flow-through to start-ups from our own early stage acceleration programs to the imec.istart business acceleration program.”

“Complementary to imec.istart’s coaching towards investment and business readiness, we guide the start-ups in their product readiness track. Verhaert also co-invested in the capital increase, which allowed the fund to grow from 12.5 million euros to more than thirty million euros. Finally, we also participate in the board of Istart Fund and its investment decisions.”

From an interview with MediaPlanet for ‘De Kracht van Vlaanderen’.

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7 ambitious medical start-ups

The second edition of this accelerator consists of another varied group of start-ups. For example, there are start-ups that focus on medical software and diagnostic and imaging devices, others focus on digital innovation with user apps and IoT solutions.

“It’s nice to see how these start-ups dare to challenge the status quo and implement new technologies in a crucial market. We’re honored to help these start-ups during these important steps within their entrepreneurial process and to help innovate the medical sector,” says Wouter Hendrickx, Manager Innovation Acceleration Solutions – Smart Life Sciences at Verhaert.

Coaching program for successful medical innovation

Developing a successful innovative medical product or service requires an iterative learning process of analyzing and adjusting. The Medical Solutions Accelerator accelerates this process with innovation methods provided by experts in medical and technological innovation in 5 intensive workshops.

The start-ups themselves are already enthusiastic, as Sara Melis, Project Manager of Enviromics (UAntwerp) agrees: “Challenging, stimulating and inspiring! The first session of the Medical Solutions Accelerator was an eye-opener for our A-Sense Lab Team. Thanks to the support of experts, we can develop our new technology for cancer detection in the most optimal way with great attention to the needs of pathologists and cancer patients.”

Pitch & networking event on 3 December

The program finishes on 3 December with a pitch and networking event. During the pitch event, a jury of experts in medical product development, MedTech entrepreneurs and investors will choose the most promising start-up. This will be followed by a networking event where the start-ups and companies from the MedTech sector can meet.

Connect with the coaches & start-ups

Keeping an eye on new players in the medical and healthcare market can help your company to stay on top. Interested to connect with the coaches from this accelerator program and its start-ups? Leave your details below!

The post Second edition Medical Solutions Accelerator starts successfully appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.

The post Second edition Medical Solutions Accelerator starts successfully appeared first on Verhaert Masters in Innovation.