Coping with the financiers: attracting venture capital investors and end-users in the biomaterials industry

Abstract

A substantial amount of research has been committed to exploring how university-based research can be transferred to industry and be commercialised. This literature emphasises the substantial institutional, cultural and financial barriers to what has been referred to as academic entrepreneurship. At the same time, and most noteworthy in the USA, university patenting has grown remarkably since the mid-1960s; today (2014), much of the basic life science research conducted by universities is being transformed into health care innovations. This paper reports on a case study of the biomaterials and medical device industry in Sweden and emphasises that, while capital funding is a key challenge for university spin-outs, an additional and less widely recognised concern facing these companies is how to make the public sector health care organisations, primarily, actually buy the products developed. The study suggests that perhaps too much emphasis is being put on ‘upstream activities’, including the early stage support provided by incubators and state agencies that provide seed-money funding, while more mature biomaterials and medical device companies are suffering from both a lack of unified regulatory frameworks and policies governing the procurement of new health care innovations.