In this blog post, we brought you the highlights from the #BHH Panel: Bringing value to the health insurance industry.
What are the key ingredients and challenges for a successful startup and corporate collaboration? What is the ¨magic recipe¨to make it work? How mature is the digital health market? Elena Vidal Liy (Adeslas), Pedro Díaz Yuste (Savia, Mapfre) and Omar Najid (Docline) share their vision and thoughts on what makes successful collaboration between startups and big corporations – and advice on how to work with them.
Here’s what we learned:
These are the key ingredients that corporations are looking for in order to collaborate with startups:
1. Apify your product and services.
Make integrations swift and smooth so that you can put them in the market really, really quick. It´s key that the startup solution or product is Apified and easy to integrate. If the integration is easy and it works corporates will go for it and pay.
Pedro Díaz Yuste from SAVIA (Mapfre Salud) mentioned that they were able to integrate ten different health tech startups in less than one year and a half to build the main value proposition of Savia.
2. Offer a win-win proposition (Always!)
Value propositions should be aligned and should answer the questions of Which is going to be the revenue for both sides? What’s going to be the return in terms of loyalty? And in terms of efficiency? etc.
For corporations, is important that startups are able to provide evidence and patient results before starting to collaborate. Once the solution is in the market and the corporate user, their user, and their customer validate, engage and love the solution, you´ll have a deal and go together.
3. Be humble! It's not a question of the companies, it's a question of the people.
Forget the old corporate thinking of ¨we´re able to build this with my 5,000 people IT team and it will work better than this startup solution¨ That’s a lie! It will never get done.
Corporations have to be humble enough to recognize that start-ups are able to build a solution that is so customer-centric that it’s really bringing a lot of value to you and your customers.
On the other side, most of the startups’ thinking is ¨we´re here to change the world and I’m not getting involved with big corporations and I’m not going to change my mind in order to give them satisfaction¨ That´s also wrong!
So if you put the ice at the same level and you build this relationship being humbled at the two sides, then things could work. This is called bidirectional humility.
4. Have the ability to execute and scale.
If you are going to work with a corporation with a large or very large number of customers, it’s really important to have the ability to execute, meet deadlines, work under pressure and be able to scale. And maybe in technology, this is more or less easy to solve, but when that involves human resources, scaling is not that easy.
5. Don´t underestimate security and privacy
Data and patient privacy are the blood of every corporation and they can´t afford to compromise them. Your solution/s needs to comply with the highest privacy standards and regulations.
What are the key factors of a collaboration between a startup and a large corporation?
If you are a startup, these are the key factors to succeed in the collaboration with insurers:
1. Think about your go-to-market strategy!
You have to build and validate your solution. Probably, you’re not going to work with a corporate or insurance company in your first year or even in your second year.
In Docline, we build our evidence by interviewing and visiting more than 400 doctors to understand how we can facilitate their work with our software. For us, it was important to build this network to test and learn.
If you are a scale-up, one of the most important key factors is to be flexible as a company to help clients on different use cases without changing your roadmap and vision. Stay focused!
2. Invest in technology, people and security.
In order to scale your startup, collaborate and work with corporates, you need to invest in technology, people and security.
You can’t build just MVPs and Lean Startup and stuff like this because this sector is all about sensitive and compliant data, GDPR, etc.
You need to build a scalable and robust product and that means money and time. So, of course, you need this very good relationship with your clients. But before that, you need very good investors.
They have to understand that you will need time to do it. You need to invest in your solution. You need to bring the best talent to your company and its resources, it’s money. So you need to invest in your people and you need the right investors in this journey
3. Create a modular solution
Easy integration and modular technology are crucial. It could be the case that corporates need only 20% of their solution for a specific project and don’t need or want all of your answers. So that modularity is so important.
If you´re interested, you can watch the full event at the following link.