French software major Dassault Systemes wants to use its India R&D facility to develop frugal solutions for manufacturing affordable medical equipment in partnership with the burgeoning start-up ecosystem.

The company sees healthtech or medtech as one of the key growth areas in India along with space tech and clean mobility.

Speaking to BusinessLine, global CEO Bernard Charles said, “Medtech could be a big opportunity for India. The pharma medtech industry has been a rich sector but it is not lean. Many of the equipment are far too costly. In India, I think we can invent frugal ways to build medical equipment which will be made available to more people.”

‘Need digital discipline’

“This will depend on government policy, but we believe that contract manufacturing in medical equipment could grow while we are helping customers in India to get through the process approval. For that, they also need digital discipline. They need to be able to trace, prove and guarantee that all the compliances are in place,” he added.

Dassault Systemes is already working with a few companies on the same in India and has also bagged a public project.

“We are already connected with a few companies doing that and explicitly helping them with European agreements so that they can produce things. I think this is a big opportunity and has scope. I am confident that we can continue to sustain double-digit growth in India on that recipe,” Charles said.

The company’s footprint in the medtech space has been expanding globally. It currently working with over 70 per cent of the medtech companies as customers in the world.

This is further enabled through the company’s cloud offerings.

Dassault is also actively working with start-ups focussing on similar target areas in India to guide them to accelerate their innovations while providing the company’s platform for free for the first six months to a year, eventually charging a subsidised fee.

“Now we are identifying start-ups. We have a very comprehensive start-up programme in place to offer them help and accelerate their innovations. It’s working well. We have been getting a lot of candidates. The selection is done based on which start-ups can take full benefit of what we can offer. We provide them our platform for free for six months to a year. We even guide them through solving certain problems they are not able to work through. Once they create relevant products, they start paying license fee,” Charles said.

Talent Crunch

Just like most companies, Dassault has been seeing a talent shortage globally including Europe and America and Charles had a unique solution to offer.

Charles believes that there needs to be a multi-disciplinary approach combining art, science and technology. This has not been the traditional way of education in our countries.

“In my view, a technician should be able to do the job of the engineer. With a click of the button the technician’s system can compute the stress, load analysis or characteristics of machine. Then I can tell engineers to do their jobs, make their imagination work to find new solutions. Today too many engineers are doing technical things and we can change that scale,” he added.

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