As a medical doctor Christoph Zrenner embraces the chance to transform everyday problems at work by creating businesses to help solve them. He knows about all the difficulties and risks of startups. Though most of all he sees the passion, the potential and the brains at the MedTech Startup School that have the power to change the world.

Push the Envelope!

I want to tell you a bit about why we’re running the MedTech Startup Incubator and what our expectations are: Some of the brightest, most ambitious and most passionate people work in academia. Our doctors and scientists, they want to push the envelope and they want their work to make a difference in the world. So why don’t they, so often?

New ideas come up every day, and at the university, we have access to incredible resources to work on them, to experiment, to figure out how to make them work. But we are too busy, especially the doctors. And we are scientists, we are not business people, so that we almost never have a chance to see our ideas become realities. The potential is there, but needs to be tapped.

It’s not the job of the university to develop products, but we believe that when a researcher or a medical doctor at the university hospital has an idea, that idea should get a chance. This is what the incubator does: we build a team of scientists, engineers and business people around a clinical or research innovation, led by a medical doctor. And we turn this into a solid business model and a working prototype that can be taken up by private industry.

We are not performing magic, but we are following and adapting a process that works extraordinarily well in Silicon Valley, at Stanford University, and at the NIH: The Startup Owner’s Manual and the Lean Launchpad Curriculum for Healthcare and Life Sciences. Our teams are built around defined clinical needs with the constant, daily involvement of the lead medical doctor who submitted the idea and has the burning desire to develop this idea.

The summer of 2015 is only the beginning, but it’s the pilot batch of five pioneers: The “Acute Stroke App” (MIP002) is helping stroke unit doctors, who work under tremendous pressure, find clinical trials offering treatment options to patients for who normal therapy is not available. The “Smart TMS for Neurotherapy” (MIP001) project is developing novel therapies for stroke rehabilitation and for the treatment of depression. The “Are you ok?” (MIP004) mood tracking app helps patients that are discharged from a psychiatry ward to bridge the time until they get an appointment with an outpatient therapist. The “24h-EOG-Smartpatch” (MIP003) is tracking natural eye movements to diagnose and manage degenerative neurological disease earlier.

The incubator itself also represents a new approach to innovation: It’s owned by a non-profit foundation and represents a vehicle in which doctors can be embedded inside the innovation projects as “on-site experts”. They receive one hour of freedom from their clinical responsibilities every day for 100 days to work with their interdisciplinary team, all from different backgrounds, all with different outlooks. It’s an intense program: each team has just these 100 days to build something that works. And the potential can already be seen!

Of course, there is no way that we could have created this project without the incredible support from the University of Tübingen, the Faculty of Medicine, the University Hospital, and the regional start-up and business development initiatives. The University’s Entrepreneurship Education events are supported by ifex – the initiative for startups and business transfer of the Ministry of Finance and Economics Baden-Württemberg and the incubator itself was conceived through a highly forward-thinking “BMBF Industrie-in-Klinik Plattformen” call. We also wish to acknowledge the support of many honorary mentors and invited outside experts from all over the world, that are coming to Tübingen to help young doctors and scientists realize their ideas. And finally, it’s because we stand on the broad shoulders of others, the folks from Silicon Valley, Stanford and MIT, who made their processes and entrepreneurship curricula freely available. Also, we are partners with JFDI.Asia in Singapore, whose five years of process experience power our Incubator, so we are able to hit the ground running in this first batch of 2015. Thank you!

Nevertheless, and in spite of all the support they are receiving, our teams are on a difficult journey, and they will not be successful without help: So we are asking you to support us, be a mentor, to help our teams understand their customer, help our doctors find the space to work with their team every day, especially during the tough times. Come to the startup school’s Lean Mondays, share your experience, visit us on the open house on Friday nights. Thank you and see you soon!

Christoph Zrenner