Fostering Entrepreneurial Investment Decision in Medical Technology Ventures in a Changing Business Environment

This paper presents the results obtained from a survey among public and private venture capitalists from countries which attract a large amount of venture capital investment: Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Israel. The objective is to investigate venture capitalists’ investment criteria for medical technology ventures in the start-up or expansion phase. Since existing research evaluated venture capitalists’ general investment criteria, the aim of this study is to provide specific results on entrepreneurial investment decisions for the medical technology sector, which constantly attracted a significant share of European venture capital. The research used semi-structured interviews with 39 venture capitalists and experts. The results show that venture capitalists prefer to invest in companies which develop products for treating and diagnosing diseases showing a high prevalence and large market volumes, such as cardiovascular, metabolic and neurological diseases, and orthopaedic disorders. The study confirms that venture capitalists use a number of industry-specific criteria highly relevant in a changing business environment. These include a high medical need for the product, availability of clinical data, stage of European Conformity approval, high probability of receiving reimbursement from health insurances, medical key opinion leaders supporting technology, management’s regulatory experience and their communication ability with doctors and key opinion leaders.