Landscape assessment and portfolio strategy for an India based funding agency in infectious disease space
Background and scope
Our client was an innovation funding agency backed by one philanthropic organization in India. It functions as a pooled financing mechanism and a platform to nurture innovative and pathbreaking solutions that have a strong potential to strengthen India’s response to infectious diseases. The client wanted to understand the technology landscape and identify the critical technologies across their four areas of focus, such as prevention, screening and diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance, to prioritize the technology and solutions to build the portfolio and make an informed decision.
The client engaged Healthark Insights to assess the healthcare technology landscape and identify the key priority technologies and solutions for prevention, screening and diagnosis, treatment, and surveillance.
Our approach
The landscape assessment and development of portfolio strategy involved rigorous research of major ticking problems, unmet need, available and upcoming technology solutions, relevant and essential criteria to consider for the pillars such as Prevention, Screening & Diagnostics, Treatment, and Surveillance. Below are the major steps in each pillar that have been involved in developing the strategy. The unmet needs then provided a base to identify the potential solution and technology landscape around the area.
Identifying the unmet need
Healthark has done research from secondary sources such as published papers having conversations with experts from various fields, and identified the unmet needs and challenges across all areas.
Defining and assessing technology landscape
The two-way approach was taken to define the technology landscape. First, the team conducted secondary research on the potential solution that could address the unmet needs. On another side, the team started looking at existing and upcoming novel solutions. Key sources from where early innovations could be captured have been identified. An exhaustive list of references has been scanned. Based on this research, we finalized potential solutions technologies for each pillar which should also address the unique identified unmet needs of respective pillars. Each technology solution is further divided based on the maturity of the solutions: Nascent, Emerging, and Mature.
Development of prioritization framework
Healthark prepared a rating framework to rank and strategically prioritized the technologies and companies which would generate maximum synergy based on the client’s existing goal. The team built the prioritization framework to identify the key technologies, the client should invest in the near future. The framework was designed on few key parameters. The decided parameters have given weightage for each pillar and have been rated in the range of 1 to 5. The same way innovations and companies have been rated based on a separate set of parameters
Identifying key priority technologies
Each identified technology has been rated on a scale of 1 to 5. And each rating was backed with defined logic. Based on the ratings and weights provided to each parameter, Healthark identified the weightage score and the high-priority technologies.
Project output
Based on our comprehensive findings and analysis, Healthark advised the client a defined framework to prioritize any technology and companies in future strategy. The client was also advised to actively pursue the identified the high priority technologies while arranging the calls or assessing the proposals from different companies. Further, Healthark provided a deck of 130+ detailed profiles of identified sample innovation companies.
