GAITS, key tool for developing healthcare innovations
<p>The CRAASH Barcelona acceleration program, which is finishing its 4th edition this month, provides participants with the tools they need to learn to use this method created by CIMIT (Boston), which assesses the maturity of the projects to ensure their success. </p>
GAITS is a visual tool created by CIMIT (Boston), the most experienced health accelerator in the world, that helps identify how mature a startup is in the four most important domains of a project: technology, clinical, market and regulatory. It is based on a circle with 10 levels that help identify and sidestep the risks a project may face. There are four circles, one for each domain.
Dr. Markus Wilhelms, CEO and co-founder of MOWOOT (a startup created out of the d·HEALTH Barcelona program that has developed a medical device to treat chronic constipation) and a CRAASH Barcelona mentor, highlights the unique contribution this tool brings to the training compared to other acceleration programs, showing projects the areas where they are weakest. “The teams learn to use this tool, which is extremely useful for detecting areas that need improvement, above all in the market and regulatory domains, where they tend to be less competitive.”
The mentors play an active role in the GAITS learning process so the teams can continue using the tool after finishing the program. “It is an advantage for teams to learn how to use it from the creators themselves,” explained Markus Wilhelm, who confesses he uses it for his own company.
4th edition of the program comes to an end
This December will see the completion of the 4th CRAASH Barcelona, for which 6 innovative, disruptive projects from the BioRegion were selected to participate. The program, organized by Biocat with collaboration from CIMIT, is closing its doors after 12 weeks of intensive training. Over this time, the teams got the chance to validate their medical device and digital health innovations.
The training is broken down into three phases: The first allows teams to validate their value proposal, business model and market with experts. The second and third phases give teams the chance to validate their project in Spain, and to get further training from Dutch university TU Delft and meet with other European entrepreneurs taking part in the German accelerator Medtech Bootcamp.