The Road to Commercialisation : Expanding Digital Health Therapeutics Across International Markets

Abstract

In recent years, a substantial number of digital health ventures have commercialised in several international markets from inception. The phenomenon of rapidly internationalising digital therapeutics firms and the findings of previous studies suggest that there is an overlap between the commercialisation and internationalisation processes. In addition, concurrent commercialisation and internationalisation by digital therapeutic start-ups are not well understood. Currently, commercialisation and internationalisation are addressed as two distinct processes in literature. The rapid internationalisation of small firms is explained by the ‘international new ventures’ and ‘entrepreneurial internationalisation’ theory (Oviatt & McDougall, 1994). On the other hand, commercialisation strategies for digital health are not well established; however, Gbadegeshin (2019) proposes a model to explain the process. In addition, generalisable commercialisation models like the ‘Entrepreneurial Strategy Compass’ (Gans et al., 2018) provide an interesting framework to explore the commercialisation of digital health. Given the current uncertainties, this study aims to understand how these elements overlap, particularly in the digital therapeutics industry. As part of the explorative qualitative study, semi-structured interviews with an inductive approach were used to address the research aim. Three aggregate dimensions were then extracted from the qualitative data: new product development, strategic market entry, and commercialisation environment. These dimensions were then broken down into specific internationalisation and commercialisation activities that contributed to understanding the overlap between these two processes. The findings of this study contribute to the digital health commercialisation literature and the understanding of the firm-level process of bringing a digital health product to market. The study finds that activities undertaken by digital therapeutics firms contribute to both commercialisation and internationalisation simultaneously, thus suggesting internationalisation elements should be considered further in commercialisation frameworks. Additionally, the study contributes to entrepreneurial internationalisation literature by showing internationalisation is a process in which new ventures achieve through different activities over time to achieve rapid internationalisation. A future research area could be to understand the behaviour and activities that drive these internationalisation processes.