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Kent DiasAbeygunawardena, IDE Group - Early Stage Product Consultancy | LSI USA '24

IDE Group is an entrepreneurial partner that discovers, develops, and delivers meaningful products and services.
Speakers
Kent DiasAbeygunawardena
Kent DiasAbeygunawardena
IDE Group

Kent DiasAbeygunawardena  0:03  
I'm Kent    DiasAbeygunawardena you can remember that as cancer and I lead the US operations for IDE Group. So we're a early stage product innovation, product development consultancy, but I'll get to that in in a little bit. I'm based out of Minneapolis and I spend my time outside of my work hours with three little boys under five. So I'm program managing and in multiple components of my life. But why we're here today is to talk about startups as a whole and and where our focuses is maintaining that startups are really that that key of innovation inside of the industry, they're the ones that are fostering that, that style of work that momentum and not hindered by bureaucracy, and in challenges of larger strategic partners. But startups are really hard. And everybody in this room probably knows that better than most. But the number of startups that aren't able to achieve, either their goals of a exit or commercialization or many other stages along the way, are tied to a number of consistent areas of issue that they run into. So the first beam as they continue to grow, they're chasing ever higher and more challenging and diverse milestones, which they may not be suited for, have the right resources, or have the time and funding to support that. They're also navigating continually new risks that come up from both a product and an organizational perspective. And they're always managing the burn startups on like their larger strategic partners tend to have finite resources. And so they're working against those changing risks and challenging milestones, with a limited and finite number of resources to achieve that. And while doing that they're continually trying to raise capital, which is diverting their attention and overall focus. So it comes into play in the way that we are focused not only on early product innovation and traditional engineering services, but we're focused on creating meaningful med tech ventures as a whole. And so we do that by working with early stage companies from a range of different starting points from traditional prototypes to established IP core technology, or simply looking at a targeted space that a clinician or others may have identified, that feeds into our traditional design development human factors in pilot production capabilities, across ID. So we have locations in Sydney, Australia, where we were founded 20 years ago, Rotterdam, Netherlands, as well as in Minneapolis, in Philadelphia. And so our focus as we walk through these processes are always not on an immediate milestone or immediate design decision, but really the final commercial outcome in generating a high value business asset as we move forward. So it is a number of different elements they bring to the table, not only in traditional innovation steps, but we also do support in finding and achieving funding for our clients, as well as that's a component of what we bring to the table of exiting and entering med tech ventures ourselves. And the three areas that we target specifically for startups as we meet them where they are, it's a range of different starting points and different expertise that founders have, as well as the teams that they built. And we try to amplify and augment what they bring to the table from a technical commercial, or regulatory capability as they move forward. We also align our processes to a very funding based strategy. So we're not working on a replenished yearly budget like large scale organizations have, but instead, working backwards from fixed budgets, to be able to make sure that they can achieve their milestone in a very targeted and controlled way. And lastly, we brand ourselves as pragmatic innovation. We have deep technical capabilities and and a range of different services. But we use them away that's intentional in how we draw out real world feasibility and viability at the end of the day. So again, we're we're targeting these teams, where they are trying to use the resources in a very effective and efficient way to get them to their endpoints and also be very intentional with pragmatic innovation, making the right product for the right market for the right people. So ice, taking on and supporting successful med tech ventures.

 

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