The Med-tech Challenge

The Medtech Challenge: Market Acceleration Training & Award Program

The MedTech Challenge: Market Acceleration Training & Award program is designed around the needs of Indian innovators and entrepreneurs working in the areas of developing medical technologies for public health who have a validated proof-of-concept for their technology and are in the process of taking their product to the market. This unique program has been developed to support medtech innovations in the late stage/commercialization stage of product development.

The program aims to fill the gap in the development and delivery of affordable medical technologies in India and plans to address the low movement of affordable technologies through the development pipeline. It will therefore select and mentor Indian entrepreneurs to further develop their medical technology innovations, which will already have strong proof-of-concept data.

The funded projects will also be mentored from a business-readiness perspective to deliver affordable medical technologies which would have maximum access through public and private markets and fulfil a strong unmet medical need.

An international technical facilitator VentureWell provided the technical assessment as well as curate and deliver the workshop to the selected applicants.

The initial submissions and interviews for assessment were completed in Jan/Feb 2020. The Joint Triage Committee had it meeting to select the applicants for the workshop was held via video conferencing on 2nd March 2020 and after due approvals, the selected applicants were informed of their selection via email on 6th March 2020.

There was a total of 22 submissions for the challenge. All applicants were assessed, and the Joint Triage Committee recommended that all 22 applicants be selected for the workshop.
The MedTech workshop was due to be held from 21-25th March 2020 in Delhi. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, several international restrictions were put into place at the time. Therefore, it was decided to postpone the workshop.

The partners then decided that the workshop would be held over a 5-week period starting 1st September 2020, through a virtual mode, with simultaneous mentorship. The workshop ended on 12th October 2020, which was followed by 4 weeks of mentorship till 9th November 2020.

Virtual Workshop

To accommodate time zones and manage online meeting fatigue, the weekly plan for the conduction of the workshop was planned such that Mondays focused on presentations and introduction of key topics, Wednesdays on networked learning, where teams participate in group discussions and attend breakouts with mentors and instructors to discuss lecture topics, customer discovery interviews, and activities in the workbook and Friday focused on ‘individual check-ins” between teams and mentors to receive feedback on their work and how it applies to their ventures.

The workshop was inaugurated on 1st August 2020 and the 5-week workshop period came to an end on 12th October 2020 and then mentorship period continued for another 4 weeks where innovators had individual check in times with their assigned and other mentors.

The reception of the workshop was very positive with all the innovators who appreciated the content, design and delivery of the workshop.
 
The Virtual workshop Orientation

The MedTech Accelerator grant application was opened on the BIRAC portal on 13th October 2020 and closed, 45 days on 26th November 2020, at 1700hrs.

At the close of the deadline, 20 applications were received on the BIRAC portal.

A unique aspect of this program was also the Pre-Accelerator Grant that was provided to the applicants who attended the workshop and mentorship period