Building a FemTech innovation strategy

Challenge

Our client wanted to develop an innovation strategy to expand and broaden their offering within the FemTech sector.

Approach

Our Front End Innovation experts (FEI) performed a market analysis to help our client identify areas to prioritise in a FemTech innovation pipeline. After establishing their capabilities and aspirations, we segmented the FemTech market using both technical and clinical variables, highlighting areas in which medical device innovation would meet gaps in the market that represent user needs. We then facilitated a strategic workshop to map key areas of opportunity to the company’s technical expertise and commercial feasibility.

Outcome

Our structured and analytical approach to market analysis allowed our client to gain a clear understanding of the FemTech market and identify several key opportunities where they could add real value and meet user needs within this sector.

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Sector
MedTech, FemTech

Services
Front end innovation
Market analysis
Workshop facilitation

Workshop facilitation: establishing capabilities and aspirations

To support our client’s aspirations for growth in the FemTech sector, we conducted a face-to-face workshop with a broad set of stakeholders from their team. This involved establishing a baseline understanding of their aspirations, technical portfolio and capabilities, commercial constraints, sales channels and key differentiators. The workshop helped align the client’s key stakeholders on objectives, as well as a clear definition of scope and start and end points for building a strategic approach.

Segmenting the FemTech market

Our client wanted to identify areas in women’s health where they could meet real needs and add value. To find these opportunities, our FemTech experts ensured we explored the full breadth of the women’s health experience.

Together with our market analysis team, our FemTech experts conducted secondary research using our proprietary tools and databases to build a comprehensive understanding of the client’s competitive landscape including key clinical research, technical developments, intellectual property and commercial activities happening in the sector. This research culminated in a thorough analysis in which we segmented the FemTech market using four different variables:

Clinical approach: what is the overall approach that the technology is taking? Is it intended for women’s well-being, targeting sex-specific conditions, or tackling sex and gender disparities in other diseases?
Therapeutic area: within these broader clinical approaches, what specific conditions and indications are being addressed?
Health technology: across the landscape of FemTech innovations enabling better women’s health experiences, how can we group the sectors of health technology that are included?
Phase of clinical journey: from prevention to maintenance, what stage of the patient care pathway is being addressed with this technology?

We performed the market segmentation with both bottom-up and top-down approaches. These methods of market segmentation allowed us to provide the client with a comprehensive analysis of market saturation, size and gaps. To capture specific areas of opportunity, we identified the different types of technology across the women’s health industry and cross-referenced these with the range of key therapeutic areas to enable us to map this to the client’s technical expertise.

Emphasising the user needs

Capturing the landscape of FemTech industry players was key in identifying commercial opportunities for our client. But we also needed to look beyond market trends to create an innovation strategy based on user needs to help ensure our client achieved commercial success.

In our market analysis, we conducted assessment activities to dig deeper into each therapeutic area identified. We wanted to understand which needs were being met and which were being overlooked. This meant looking at the pain-points and gaps highlighted by patients, healthcare professionals and researchers in the literature.

A core element of market analysis is the careful consideration of the broader goals prevalent in the industry and the context behind why particular trends have arisen. This is especially important in women’s health, where historically, stigmas, data gaps and bias have contributed to an incomplete understanding of women’s needs and experiences.

It’s important to be mindful of our own unconscious biases rooted in the language we are using every day to describe women’s health issues. The FemTech industry is making great progress to raise awareness around women’s health and we want to make sure our segmentation captures the nuances that are often overlooked.
Lara Zaki, FEI Strategy and Innovation Consultant, Team Consulting

Developing a FemTech innovation strategy

We helped our client prioritise areas of opportunity in the FemTech industry based on both insights collected during our market analysis and our user needs assessment.

This process allowed us to identify gaps in the FemTech market where the client could focus on innovations to disrupt the care pathway and improve patient outcomes and experiences. We recommended strategic opportunities that were not only compatible with their technical expertise and capabilities, but that would also be commercially viable and address real needs.

Outcome

We helped the client team align on key areas of focus within the FemTech sector and the strategic direction for their innovation pipeline, creating a strong foundation upon which to build further development activities.