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Story 30 January 2023
Public

Coaching Corner with Idoven & MJN: Following the right path for business growth

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Mariana Marques

Often, we tell startups' stories through their achievements: the disruptive innovations, the new funding rounds, or international partnerships. But to get there, innovators have to undertake a long journey, facing the challenges of an unknown market, conducting pilots and trying to stand out in a crowd of competitors. On the fourth Coaching Corner episode, we collected the testimonies of Manuel Marina Breysse, Co-founder and CEO of Idoven, and of David Blánquez & Jordina Arcal, respectively CEO and Deputy CEO of mjn-neuro. The business coach that followed both EIC-funded companies is Jose Martinez.

 

In this edition, we focus on two Spanish companies working on medical innovations: Idoven is a health technology company advancing early detection and precision medicine for cardiovascular diseases, while using the power of artificial intelligence (AI); and mjn-neuro, a start-up that designs, manufactures and markets medical devices with the aim of improving quality of life for people with epilepsy. While working within the same sector, these two companies had different needs for development that were explored and mastered during several weeks of coaching in 2021. 

Continue reading to learn more about their journeys!

 

Defining the path for market success

Idoven partners with leading medical device and pharmaceutical companies on AI-driven innovations to develop a new standard of cardiovascular care. With an AI-based innovative solution in hands, their biggest challenge was to determine the most viable path for its commercialisation. According to their CEO, Manuel Marina Breysse: “While we had a strong understanding of the technology and its potential applications, we needed guidance on bringing it to market and scaling the business effectively.”.

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When it comes to mjn-neuro, the CEOs saw it as a long race: “At the beginning, it was to be able to develop a new device from scratch, then it was the medical device regulatory process, which was very difficult, and now the whole commercialisation process, which involves Spain and abroad.”. Still, the challenge they wanted to tackle more directly was to better understand the investors’ point of view: how to address them and most importantly, what should be shown and the best way to do it.

Jose Martinez, the coach responsible for accompanying both companies, saw their main challenges as being the need for defining a unique selling point, in the case of Idoven, and increasing capital and defining the ideal partnering model to address the market for mjn-neuro.

 

Coach’s approach: Taking steps in the right direction

After the initial meetings and sharing of needs and expectations, the coach starts to understand the companies’ needs, as well as the motivations of who runs them. Jose highlighted this aspect for mjn-neuro: “We jointly defined the main goal to achieve and the key topics of the process. That was pivotal to be focused on the meetings and to obtain some useful outcomes from the process.”. Jose also mentioned the more personal connection of mjn-neuro’s CEO to the company’s product: “The CEO’s biggest challenge was to deliver a solution to help his daughter with epilepsy. He was hugely motivated to run the long road of bringing a medical device to the market.”.

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Idoven’s process required gathering answers to key questions: “In this case, a ton of questions, on top of the regular ones, were needed to find out the role and interest of each of the founders, the huge value behind the project, the IP assets, etc. Once we were able to get to the bone of the company and the project, we were able to jointly rebuild the value pitch, creating a new approach to partners and investors.”, explained Jose.

 

Reaching a successful destination

Manuel Marina Breysse, co-founder and CEO of Idoven, told us about the importance of their work with the coach: “It was extremely helpful and valuable. Over several intense weeks, Jose provided valuable insights and guidance. He helped us to think more critically about our go-to-market plan and provided valuable insights on how to approach internationalisation and growth.”. 

mjn-neuro worked with Jose to really improve their approach with investors, as described to us: “In the end, everything we see and read at our pace is worth more than words, so it was important to have a presentation support in which our business plan is represented in a graphical way. We also added some data that we did not consider important from the investor's point of view. So, we have implemented the improvements as indicated by our coach.”.

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Idoven: “Overall, the coaching process helped us refine our focus and better understand how to bring our innovative solution to market step by step successfully.”

mjn-neuro: “In general we can say that it has been a rethinking of how to sell the investment round. How to focus our speech and how to improve the visual aspect of our presentation.”

 

In conclusion, the representatives from both companies praised the good relation and positive outcomes of being coached by Jose. They also emphasized how the different type of support provided by the EIC, including the coaching opportunity, is helping them develop and scale up their businesses.

 

If you would like to discover more information about our coaching services, please visit our EIC website

 

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