Startups, Devices & Diagnostics

Philips healthcare accelerator HealthWorks uses #JPM18 to recruit startups in program expansion

The week at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare conference, HealthWorks spent the week interviewing candidates for the Cambridge, Massachusetts cohort of Philips' healthcare startup accelerator.

While investors and healthcare entrepreneurs spent the better part of J.P. Morgan crisscrossing the financial district for meetings with life science and health technology entrepreneurs, Darren Adams spent the week in a WeWork office interviewing candidates for the Cambridge, Massachusetts cohort of Philips’ healthcare startup accelerator HealthWorks. One of three innovation leads for the Cambridge, Massachusetts chapter of the program,

Adams shared the office with DreamIt Health, which was also doing some recruiting of its own.

Now in its second year, HealthWorks is a program geared towards providing the medtech business with critical insight on new developments in healthcare and a window into how entrepreneurs are addressing pain points in care. On the flipside, the three-month program is intended to give entrepreneurs a sense of what it is like to work for a massive company without asking them to pay fees nor taking equity.

“The premise of setting up HealthWorks was to accomplish two different things,” said Adams. “As we build more heavily into technology, we want to create a pathway so we can add businesses for new business creation.”

In turn, startups in the program get access to Philips’ legal, procurement and HR departments.

Philips research and development arm tends to be very corporate focused, observed Adams.

“If Philips isn’t open to working with external partners with disruption happening in healthcare, we will get left behind,” Adams said.

Last year was a practice run for the accelerator with 15 medtech startups spread across Eindhoven, Cambridge, and Bangalore to see if the program had value.

This year, two more cities have been added — Amsterdam and Hamburg, Germany.  Cambridge, which will have a cancer diagnostics focus, kicks off in February as does Hamburg, which will highlight cardiology solutions. Other concentrations it would like to add include preventive care and fertility, pregnancy and parenting.

One way HealthWorks identifies appropriate companies for the program is to tap other accelerators for their insight, as it has done with Dreamit Health.

Corporate accelerators have become fairly common, but it will be interesting to see if HealthWorks can carve a niche for itself that fits in with the accelerator landscape.

“Startups have taken us on a journey that we couldn’t get anywhere else,”

Photo: Natalie Mis, Getty Images

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