How To Avoid 5 Common Mistakes Healthcare Startups Make

At least 90% of startups fail. And in the healthcare strategy course I teach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, I caution students that the odds of failure in medicine are even greater.Failures in health innovation rarely stem from flawed products. Almost always, they’re the result of mistakes founders make early in the journey, long before the first sale or clinical deployment.Entrepreneurs drawn to the $5-trillion U.S. healthcare market often assume their success in other industries will carry over. But the system’s distinct structures, cultural norms and unwritten rules trip them up. The results catch them by surprise.One of the most common causes of failure happens when entrepreneurs start by finding or developing a promising technology and then go searching for a medical use case. Sometimes it’s a device. Sometimes software. Sometimes a service.But in healthcare, even technically impressive innovations fail to succeed unless they address a clinical need that doctors and hospitals place at the top of their priority list.