​The Importance of Biomedical Technology Incubation within Public and Private Sectors 

by Dr Danny Belkin, Director, SCOUT

Medical technology development towards commercialization is a very complex path that is fraught with pitfalls and many points at which decisions which can prove detrimental to the ultimate feasibility and success of a product can be mistakenly taken. Staff conducting such projects within public healthcare are particularly susceptible to these due to potential lack of experience and support structures aimed at ensuring they are proactively negated and avoided. Incubation frameworks such as SCOUT are becoming more prevalent in public sector entities in Singapore and beyond and are aimed at optimizing the technology yield emerging from these bodies: to ensure that if a technology has real potential it will have the best chance of actually becoming a privately funded startup. SCOUT itself was set up last year with the goal of nurturing promising research and innovation projects from throughout the SingHealth cluster and accelerating their momentum towards commercialization and medical deployment via spinning off start-up companies. This talk will make an introduction into entrepreneurship within public healthcare, then cover both the need for support mechanisms such as SCOUT, and the framework and activities of the Incubator itself.