MassDevice New Year’s Special | Brent Hudson

Brent Hudson
CEO, Sagentia Advisors

Brent Hudson is the CEO of technology and product development consulting firm Sagentia and his company is bearing witness to both an improving economy for entrepreneurs and a regulatory system that is becoming harder to grapple with for small companies. Cambridge, U.K.-based Sagentia opened up an office in tech-heavy Cambridge, Mass. in November; Hudson offered his predictions for an industry of whose growth he hopes to take advantage.

I expect an acceleration of the mega-trends in the US medical device/biotech industry during 2011. These trends include:

• Companies continuing to invest in innovation as a means of maintaining competitive advantage, despite margins being hit.





• A transitioning of point of care from clinical environments towards the home. This is being driven by the increased focus on cost reduction and healthcare effectiveness and will result in a convergence of the medical and consumer sectors. The important thing here is that this convergence will require a very different approach to R&D from companies on either side.
• To accompany the above, there is the growing home wellness market. Although being driven by the Baby Boomer generation this seems to be of growing interest/concern to a large portion of consumers.




• The changing and uncertain regulatory environment will impact operational requirements and will require a new set of processes to be adopted.




• Changes to reimbursement strategy will play an increasingly important role in management room discussions and company strategy.





• The Emerging Markets will continue to grow in importance. As a result, companies will need to lay out their strategy for developing feature-sets that specifically address these markets.

Sagentia is in a good position given the trends outlined above and our priority entering 2011 is recruitment in the US. Our focus will be on making sure that we have enough great talent and resources to adequately service our growing order book. We know that our people are the key to maintaining our position at the forefront of cutting edge science & technology research and product development.

Despite some regulatory changes to deal with, I think the climate is very positive for start-ups and entrepreneurs. Sagentia works with a number of early stage companies and many of them are closing high funding rounds. VC money seems to be available if you have the winning combination of a good technology, a solid management team and a clear vision of how you will get to good money swiftly. T2 Biosystems, one of our early stage clients, is a great example of this.