ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Bringing strategic partners in at any but the latest stage used to be anathema to start-ups, who feared corporate alliances meant ceding valuable rights and compromising an exit. But now mega-incubator The Foundry is teaming with Covidien at the earliest possible point – before the project is even selected.
Over a decade ago, executives at Menlo Park, CA-based The Foundry launched what would become arguably the medtech industry’s most successful medical device incubator, with more than a dozen companies to its credit, including Evalve, Concentric, and Ardian. If The Foundry didn’t invent device incubation, it has come as close as any organization to establishing and proving the model. But now, as The Foundry prepares to launch its 15th company, Foundry executives have begun a new program that may reinvent device incubation itself.
