Practice makes perfect, whether it is finding the next president of the US or in corporate venturing. Ohio has been getting pretty good at both, with seven presidents born in the US state and more than a decade of incubation and investment from the region’s largest non-profit medical centre, Cleveland Clinic.
Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) has licensed more than 250 technologies and incubated 35 new companies that have received more than $340m in follow-on funding from other investors.
The most recent spin-out was ImageIQ, an imaging contract research organisation, after an eight-year incubation, while CCI has also reinvested in Explorys during its latest $11.5m round.
After a decade, CCI has also started reaping financial rewards with a reported $10m per year in licensing fees and a $28m return from selling Intelect Medical to Boston Scientific for a $78m enterprise value.
Chris Coburn, executive director of CCI and speaker at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium last month, said: "Cleveland is an emerging hub for healthcare IT start-ups, and ImageIQ has a compelling blend of software engineering and biomedical expertise."
It is also becoming a hub for how corporate venturing units can work with peers – even if that involves running a potential rival’s innovation centre for the first time.
In January, Cleveland Clinic and MedStar Health, a similar non-profit with hospitals in Maryland and Washington DC, said they would collaborate on medical inventions and innovations.
The alliance will last for an initial three years and CCI will hire two or three staff members to work with MedStar staff in Maryland and Washington and will be in charge of MedStar Institute for Innovation. MedStar’s institute was set up two years ago and will now benefit from CCI’s process as well as engineering and prototyping laboratory.
Teaming up will give a wider pool of ideas and also patients to provide feedback and was a response to growing pressures to cut costs while finding innovative ways to improve patient health and care delivery that is now becoming possible as patient records are digitalised and can be shared.
Thomas Graham, a hand surgeon and chairman of Cleveland Clinic Innovations, told news provider Washington Post: "Reinventing the wheel everywhere is not as favourable an option as forging collaboration.
"This allows us to open up a larger-scale collaboration that can be helpful in improving patient access, getting clinical answers and expanding innovation."
The access to patients is a resource CCI is offering to entrepreneurs. Last month, Rainbow Medical, which invests mainly in medical devices companies founded by serial entrepreneur Yossi Gross, agreed with Cleveland Clinic to offer its early-stage products and concepts for testing by the hospital’s staff.