Sustainable Startup Growth: Balancing Innovation With Scalability In A Venture Studio

The $400 Bn+ Indian healthcare sector is crucial to effective nation-building – it adds to the economy through direct employment of 6 Mn+ people, and its success leads to a healthy and productive 1.4 Bn+ population. 

The sector is faced with known challenges such as affordability, access, and quality, and it is mission-critical to address them with disruptive innovation. Given the magnitude of the gaps, incremental and piecemeal improvements are not enough, and we need a transformative mindset combining advances in medicine and AI with business realities. 

Innovating in healthcare is hard for a startup for a variety of reasons: 

• Limited access to closed-door insights: In order to improve healthcare, it is necessary to have a granular understanding of clinical workflows, patient journeys, and stakeholder personas. This allows for the identification of new and unique pain points that may not be obvious from a surface-level analysis. 
• Slow adoption by both patients & healthcare professionals: Patients naturally value trust when it comes to their health, causing hesitance towards new solutions from new entrants. For instance, patients battling cancer will never trust a new hospital let alone a new digital health offering as the downside risk of their decision is very grave.  Similarly, doctors, who are used to specific protocols and established models of treatment often require a higher burden of proof and will be slow to accept newer solutions, such as a new novel pharmacotherapeutic or digital therapeutic agent.
• Need to understand complex and ever-changing regulations: By the nature of the industry where patient lives are at stake, regulations will always play an essential role. So, if you’re the CEO, you need to not only understand and adhere to the regulations, but also be able to keep up with the constantly evolving rules. Recent examples being the Clinical Trials Bill, e-Pharmacy guidelines, ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) bill to name a few.

This makes innovation in healthcare an uphill task. However, this is only half the battle. Once the initial challenge of creating a differentiated, winning solution has been overcome, the real task is to then scale the idea to a sustainable venture and create access for a large segment of the population.

What Are The Challenges For Scalability? 

Scalability is crucial for healthcare startups since most problem statements require large scale adoption and implementation. It’s not just about growing the business but doing so in a way that maintains or improves the quality of care.

Standardisation Of Care And Operations

Healthcare’s complexity and clinical condition variability makes standardisation tough. Yet, for the successful scale-up of a technology-enabled healthcare services company, we need consistent protocols across all clinics and doctors. 

The operations of the business need to be set to maintain balance between uniform care and professional judgment. And the clinical pathways need to evolve given the advancing research as well as data from on-going operations. 

Onboarding Multi-Functional Talent With Mission Alignment

Scaling a healthcare venture means finding people with niche skills, a deep understanding of the field’s complexity, a futuristic outlook, and passion for the problem/concept at hand. 

Finding new team members who mirror this dedication to steady growth is challenging. The healthcare talent ecosystem in India is still in its nascency and is constantly evolving.  

Distribution Networks For Reaching Demand

Reaching patients with a new clinical offering in India can be difficult due to the low insurance penetration and limited coverage for out-patient care. The country’s healthcare market is characterized by a diverse population, with varying levels of awareness, willingness to pay, and access to services. 

This means that healthcare providers in India must have an exhaustive and multi-channel distribution approach. Strategies that work for the first 1,000 patients may not be effective for the next 100,000, located in different regions, influenced by different stakeholders, and accessible through different channels.

Founders must constantly balance the tightrope between addressing the challenges of scaling their business while continuing to innovate their core product, considering newer clinical and technology developments, and feedback from their patients. This equilibrium is crucial, yet there are very few established playbooks for doing this today at scale.

How Innovation And Scalability Go Hand In Hand Via A Venture Studio?

These are common questions that keep healthcare founders awake at night. 

When’s the right time for the company to wrap up experiments at its core and kick-start a second clinic?

How do I know when my Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is polished enough to greenlight a large-scale manufacturing order?

As an AI-first company, when should we start monetising vs dedicatedly keep perfecting the Language Model (LLM)? 

These critical questions have a serious impact on an organisation’s budgets, planning, and performance. 

So How Does A Venture Studio Help In Answering These? 

A Venture Studio is an organisation that identifies opportunities or problems, develops solutions along with founders, launches new companies from the ground up, and provides extensive operational and strategic support until the companies achieve product-market fit. 

Most importantly, they have institutional knowledge on how to allocate resources, cost & time between the divergent needs of innovation & scalability at different stages of the business lifecycle. 

2070 Health, India’s first healthcare Venture Studio, is building new healthcare companies from scratch. Here’s an example of how it helped build a company in the medical weight-loss space.

In summary, Studio helps solve challenges in innovation and scalability and maintains an optimal balance between the two.

Conclusion

Innovation is at the core of improving healthcare, but it’s like solving a tricky puzzle – understanding industry needs, gaining patient and doctor trust, and addressing complex regulations. Then there’s scaling up, a whole different game with challenges like understanding the most viable GTM approach and setting up differentiated distribution networks. 

Successful companies have learned that innovation and scale can seem to have a trade-off at first but in long term, scale is a feeder to innovation. After achieving product validation and PMF, the next challenge for a company is to maintain this success with thousands or millions of users. 

Venture studios can be game-changers by assisting founders in not only identifying the right problem or PMF, but also in continually scaling and innovating. Studios are an ever-evolving treasure trove of learning aimed at perfecting the recipe for optimizing innovation and growth.

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