Helping global startups with an India market-entry strategy via the German Accelerator
Background
Turian Labs partnered with the German Accelerator on their Next Step (Asia) India program, focusing on enabling startups to craft an entry strategy via a deeper understanding of Indian market dynamics
Next Step Asia is a market discovery program providing an in-depth perspective of the region's business and innovation ecosystem. It is an initiative of German Accelerator, run by German Entrepreneurship GmbH and supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi).
PROJECT BRIEF
The objective of this engagement was to help the cohort of startups over a course of 5 weeks to decode the India market with a specific focus on:
Understanding emerging trends from a India standpoint, including how these can be leveraged by businesses
Exploring the essence of doing business in India
Understanding customer demographics from a segmentation standpoint
Re-crafting a value proposition aligned with the opportunities mapped as part of the program
TURIAN LABS’ APPROACH
Our approach encompassed our knowledge of Megatrends and our understanding of Indian consumers/users across the board through our repertoire of work.
This engagement was scheduled to be in-person, where the startups were supposed to travel to India in March and immerse themselves in the Indian ecosystem. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the entire engagement had to move to a virtual model. This created an additional challenge: keeping the cohort engaged in an effective way while managing ‘Zoom’ fatigue.
We split the entire engagement into smaller interventions, as well 1-on-1 sessions.
We also had a gap of few days between two interventions, which ensured that the startups got ample time to prepare and reflect both before and after sessions.
We also deployed remote Kanban-based collaboration tools during brainstorming and ideation.
Startup cohort
The cohort of startups were from the HealthTech and EduTech domains with varying degrees of preparedness in terms of the products/solutions. The startups were:
BioVariance GmbH, who provide broad bioinformatic services focusing on complex biomedical data analyses and related software development for the pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare sector.
SEIS GmbH, a German company backed up by Sistemas Expertos e Ingeniería de Software Limitada (a company working more than 10 years for the healthcare sector in Chile). Their tools and interfaces power more than 25% of hospitals and clinics in the public sector in Chile, and they are among the fastest growing companies in the healthcare sector in Latin America.
Canostix, who aim to beat cancer, simply by diagnosing it so early, that it can be already cured today. They achieve this by developing a blood-based early detection test that combines photonics and machine learning. Starting with the five most common cancers, covering 50% of all cancer cases, they created a constantly evolving software solution that upgrades available hardware into top-of-the-line screening machines.
EDUBAO, who lowers transaction and search costs of mobile students by providing a comprehensive customized overview of global education opportunities using smart data. Their proprietary software finds the best matching education intuitions and study programs based on personal preconditions and preferences to foster an optimal decision-making process for a long-term investment in education.
Commencement | India & sector immersion
The India immersion presentation by Turian Labs provided a quick dive on the India market to include the macro factors (economic/policy/social), top themes and emergent trends across domains. Special emphasis was placed on providing a macro understanding of the Healthcare and the Education sector, outlining the evolution and future opportunities through anecdotal evidence in the form of insights and case studies.
A case-in-point was understanding who is the payer in an Indian healthcare context. While it is a fact that India has one of the lowest costs of healthcare services in the world, good quality healthcare is still out of reach for the majority of the population. In India, 65% of expenditure is out of pocket (an individual has to pay for the majority of the medical bills). Less than 50% of the population have some form of health insurance. A majority of the insured population are covered under government-sponsored schemes, with significant coverage limitations. Insurance companies are constantly trying to design innovative products that offer optimal pricing and coverage. Read more
Deep-dive | The essence of doing business in India
After the participants were inducted into the Indian ecosystem via the India and sector immersion, it was time to do a deep-dive and understand the finer aspects of doing business in India. We took the participants through case studies from our repertoire of work. Through this, they were able to better understand the ecosystem in action and explore the interactions of the different stakeholders involved.
When we progressed into 1-on-1 interactions with individual startups, we were able to further dive in their area of specialisation and identify areas of opportunity.
A couple of startups were in the cancer diagnostics and care space: the following is an excerpt of that discussion:
The field of cancer diagnosis is constantly evolving and changing, but diagnosticians still struggle to keep up with demand. Cancer is an important public health challenge with ~9 lakh cases & ~4 lakh cancer-related deaths annually. The dearth of specialised medical facilities, shortage of medical professionals and late clinical presentation of symptoms result in ineffective treatment outcomes. With AI, one can build smart diagnostics that can aid doctors in making more accurate and faster decisions.
There are a lot of startups operating in this space and coming up with low-cost, non-invasive solutions. It's a win-win situation for both the startup and the stakeholders involved. Startups have access to volumes of data from this patient pool, which helps them improve the accuracy of their algorithm, and patients get a low-cost, affordable solution.
These discussions translated into enhancing the key levers of the Business Model Canvas (BMC) with regards to value proposition and customer segments. If you take the example of a study-abroad aspirant, the role of an influencer becomes critical. From the Indian perspective, parents play a key role in the decision making process and have a huge influence on the student’s thought process. As a business, it is equally important to tune your messaging so that it appeals to the right influencer as well.
(The startups had crafted the first version of their BMC after the India immersion, which became the base of subsequent discussions with various stakeholders they met as part of the program.)
Convergence | Synthesizing findings
Startups spent a couple of weeks reflecting on discussions and interacting with the industry experts and potential partners, which were arranged by the German Accelerator team. The findings from these discussions became a point of convergence, translating into identifying the right customer segments and sharpening their value proposition.
These conversations also helped demystify certain biases about India such as, “Indians prefer affordable solutions”. These biases can be discovered by creating a use-case driven customer journey map, which helps identify decision-making pivots and jobs to be done. These in turn became the anchors of the re-crafted value proposition.
Hand-off | Ready to fly
Our engagement culminated in a peer-learning session, where startups exchanged their learnings and snippets of their India entry strategy. A part of the interaction was also focused on the product/solution readiness from an India market perspective, the need to customise their offering and their affinity to launch in India.