Early Development Firms Set the Stage for Medical Devices

The past couple of years have witnessed the formation of more than a dozen companies focused on taking a portfolio of very early stage medical devices to the next level. With good ideas and connections, device industry executives, as an alternative to joining operating companies are increasingly joining incubators where they can keep their hands in device company creation over a number of projects. Whether you call these companies incubators or accelerators, they all share the goal of filling a gap between technology and company creation, and funding. Accelerators can help early stage concepts get the hearing they normally might not get either in the venture capital community, which is prepared to take on clinical and market risk but not technological risk, or large companies, which are focused on maintaining existing businesses. In fact, for certain kinds of broadly-enabling platform technologies that cut across clinical specialties, the incubator/accelerator model makes a lot of sense.