This week Simon Mifsud, Bob Bruce and I attended and exhibited on behalf of Garland Surgical Ltd at the West Midlands Health Tech Innovation Accelerator – WMHTIA International Assembly at the NEC in Birmingham.
As a small start-up we have received so much support from West Midlands Health Tech Innovation Accelerator – WMHTIA over the last few months. In July we were delighted to win an R&D grant to help us continue our ambitious and rapid MaltaHip development plans. And over the last few months I have been part of the West Midlands Health Tech Innovation Accelerator – WMHTIA programme cohort which has been delivered in conjunction with Bruntwood SciTech and Triple Chasm. The programme has given me some valuable learning experiences, from investment pitch clinics to deep dives into the internal and external aspects of Garland as a business and how to optimise our product and company value. Thanks to Sam Dods, Uday Phadke and Ruxandra Jianu for your teaching, advice and support so far. It was great to catch up with some of my fellow cohort members Leah Vanono and Mariano Buso, as well as Ruxandra Jianu.
Thank you to Dr Luan Linden-Phillips, Alex Mauser, and Derek Sear for putting together a well organised, well attended and informative event. There was a really nice mixture of plenary talks, workshops and networking opportunities. I really enjoyed the the workshop run by Azets Consulting Forresters and Shoosmiths covering how to prepare your business to secure capital and my 1:1 regulatory session with Kirsty Ostle of Advena Ltd (UK).
The Brokerage event was a fast paced, timed networking event with 15 minute meetings which really helped to focus conversations! Belen Rebollo-Garcia, Kathryn Wagstaff, Rebecca P., Dr. Miguel Fernandez-Vicente, Danielle Hamill (Walmsley), Judith Stewart Robert Malcolm thank you for taking the time to meet with us and I look forward to future potential collaborations.
It was great to talk about the MaltaHip to people from all sorts of organisations from Innovate UK and the NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) to engineers, clinicians and entrepreneurs. There is so much help out there but sometimes it comes down to attending these kind of events and meeting people in person to have truly valuable interactions.
Finally thanks to Andrew Flint and Becky Swale from PLATINUM PRINT LIMITED for helping me to put together our roller banner so quickly. I first starting using Platinum in the late 90s at the first company I worked for (Atlantech Medical Devices) and it was a no brainer when we were needing a high quality stand producing quickly!
#WMHTIA #Innovation#MaltaHip #Angelinvestment #totalhipreplacement