Encouraging the Development of Medical Technology Cluster in the Baltimore Region

Scope: 

Economic infrastructure, strategic talent management, entrepreneurship

Challenge & Goal:

Baltimore, a city that has been a pioneer in health care delivery and discovery, has great potential to become a hub for medical technology startups. Despite having access to talent trained by top educational institutions like Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and Loyola University, as well as strategic location of the city, it has thus far experienced slow growth in medical technology innovation. The goal of this project was to provide recommendations and solutions to the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech) on ways to create an ecosystem in Baltimore to attract medical technology innovators.

Approach:

We interviewed more than twenty startups in the med tech field in the greater Baltimore area as well as incubators and accelerator places that house early-stage startups. The goal for the discovery period and research was to identify the challenges and shortcomings that these entrepreneurs face during design, prototyping, development, marketing, and other stages of enterprise formation. 

Solution:

Based on the research findings, we learned that the current issue in Baltimore is an infinite sequence of lack of resources (size) and bottlenecks with no true origin. We need to provide capital and experienced labor to reach a tipping point and attract talent and innovators.

Attaining that size, or the critical mass of medical device companies could be achieved by:

Establishing public-private innovation centers to attract mid- to large-sized medical device companies

Encouraging larger companies not in the medical device space to enter the sector through cost-matching or grant-funded partnerships with small companies or startups

Growing local medical device companies with an increased emphasis on late-stage or emerging company funding to help companies beyond the seed-funding stage

Collaborators: Sam Hong, Katharina Schmidt, Joshua Wang, Hao Jia, Jing You, Belinda Peng

Links to the related articles:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-report-gives-guidance-on-growing-baltimore-medical-device-community-300158787.html

https://gbc.org/center-maryland-26/