French software company Dassault Systems is looking to use its India R&D facility to develop affordable solutions for manufacturing affordable medical devices in partnership with the rapidly growing start-up ecosystem.
The company sees healthtech or medtech as one of the key growth areas in India along with space tech and clean mobility.
talking to business Line, Global CEO Bernard Charles said, “MedTech can be a huge opportunity for India. The pharma medtech industry has been a prosperous sector but it is not a lean one. Many devices are very expensive. In India, I think we can invent frugal ways to make medical equipment that will be made available to more people.”
‘Digital discipline needed’
“This will depend on government policy, but we believe contract manufacturing in medical devices can increase while we help customers in India get process approvals. For that they also need digital discipline. They should be able to trace, prove and guarantee that all compliances are in place,” he said.
Dassault Systems is already working with a few companies in India and has also got a public project.
“We’re already involved with some companies and obviously helping them with European agreements so that they can produce things. I think it’s a big opportunity and there’s scope. I believe That we can continue to have double-digit growth in India on that recipe,” Charles said.
The company’s footprint in the medtech space is growing globally. It is currently working with over 70 percent of MedTech companies in the world as customers.
This is further enabled through the company’s cloud offerings.
Dassault is also actively working with start-ups in India focusing on similar target areas to guide them to accelerate their innovations, while offering the company’s platform free of cost for the first six months to a year. to be provided, eventually the subsidy fee can be charged.
“Now we are identifying the start-ups. We have a very comprehensive start-up program which provides them support and accelerates their innovations. It’s working well. We are getting a lot of candidates. The selection is made on the basis of which start-ups can take full advantage of what we have to offer. We provide them our platform for free for six months to one year. We also guide them to solve some problems which they are not able to work through. Once they make the relevant product, they start paying the license fee,” Charles said.
talent crunch
Like most companies, Dassault is seeing talent shortages globally, including in Europe and the US, and Charles had a unique solution to offer.
Charles believes that a multidisciplinary approach is needed, combining art, science and technology. This has not been the traditional way of education in our countries.
“In my view, a technician should be able to perform the engineer’s job. With a click of a button the technician’s system can perform the stress, load analysis or characteristics calculation of the machine. Then I can tell the engineers to do their work. Let their imagination work to find new solutions. Today a lot of engineers are doing technical things and we can change that scale,” he said.
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