Villgro Africa was engaged to conduct market research, provide market insights and advise on a “go-to-market” strategy for two medical devices. The client was interested in better understanding the market and human impact potential for their innovations in the East African region. They then further engaged Villgro Africa to develop a comprehensive business and commercialisation plan that would highlight how their innovations could be manufactured in Africa.
To begin, the team identified potential customers in Kenya and Tanzania and sought to understand the current technologies and capacity in relation to the need our client’s medical devices would address. Utilising documents gathered by the client, we conducted a literature review and identified outstanding questions and potential opportunities to explore in more depth during consultations. We then conducted over 10 consultations with key players in the sector across the value chain including distributors, doctors, research institutes and humanitarian organisations. This enabled us to conduct an analysis of substitutes that existed in the market and compared it with our client’s products to assess the competitive advantage and their positioning within the market. We summarised our market research into a report that contained an assessment of the current state of this particular area of the market in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as key opportunities and challenges for the client.
We then embarked on developing a commercialisation plan that included a financial model and offered a clear and concise description of the market potential as well as a planned path to commercialisation. The document included a strategy the client could use to generate revenue, its business opportunities and a description of the current and anticipated resources required to address the opportunity enabled by the introduction of their products. The team also built upon work from the market research by providing a fully narrated commercialisation plan which included (1) the products, (2) market, (3) manufacturing plan, (4) marketing strategies, (5) finance plan as described in the financial model, (6) identifiable risks and (7) intellectual property (IP) protection.
We also developed a financial model that forecasted the timings and estimations of capital required, providing a clear description of the financial needs for commercialisation of the product and its related processes. The model considered a number of scenarios related to packaging of the client’s products. The revenue and expenditure were forecasted for up to five years including its growth.