The Smartest Places on Earth by Antoine van Agtmael

Author:Antoine van Agtmael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610394369
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

Optomed’s Smartscope retinal imaging device. Credit Optomed

In addition to personal qualities—an ability to think differently, optimism, and persistence—the entrepreneur needs government assistance, marketing partners, and, very important, money. Kopsala thought he could develop a prototype in two years with a €1 million investment and half that amount from Tekes, a Finnish agency that finances innovation, but it ended up taking five years and €12 million to create a prototype that was credible to potential customers and partners, and a total of eight years to become a financially viable business.

During those years, Kopsala spent as much as 70 percent of his time talking to potential investors. In October 2010, his colleagues completed a prototype with an outstanding optical design and, with the last of his money, Kopsala traveled to the United States to meet with Volk, a well-regarded lens manufacturing company based in Cleveland, which had been considering Optomed as a supplier. Kopsala joined Volk’s CEO and CTO on a journey across the United States, visiting clinics, doing demonstrations for ophthalmologists and optometrists, and calling on university professors to talk up his product. “I went through the wringer,” Kopsala remembered, but Volk was convinced.59 Volk acquired exclusive distribution rights for the device in North and South America, and its English parent company, Halma Plc, invested €2 million to bring the product to market.

Optomed launched its first viable, if imperfect, commercial product in the spring of 2011, and it gained acceptance in the market, particularly from pediatric ophthalmologists, who liked using the handheld product with children because they have difficulty sitting still before the traditional retinal scanner. It also proved popular with doctors who perform outreach screening for eye diseases in villages in developing countries and with customers in emerging markets. The Aravind Eye Care System, based in India, performs more cataract surgeries than any company in the world. Seeking to become the “McDonald’s of eye surgery,” Aravind uses Optomed’s handheld scanners to streamline its surgeries into an assembly line–like process that reduces the duration of the average procedure to two minutes (it usually takes forty minutes) and cuts costs by 99 percent.

Today, Optomed’s growth in sales and presence—along with its success in attracting partners in Europe, the United States (Volk), Europe (Zeiss), and Japan (Canon)—gives Kopsala confidence that the company has a bright future and could disrupt the life-sciences market. It also introduced him to the concept of smart manufacturing. Although he originally assumed that production would take place in China or Thailand, he started manufacturing in Austria and will soon bring it to Oulu. Why? “The plant needs to be close to the engineers who designed the Smartscope™,” he said. “You need a lot of engineering support and also must be able to get to market fast.”

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