What’s next for HealthTech accelerators? The case for co-design

HealthTech accelerators are increasingly prominent initiatives for supporting the growth of early-stage innovations in MedTech, Digital Health and BioTech. These targeted 3–12 month programmes guide projects through regulatory, commercial, design and funding challenges to bring innovations to market. Despite the expansion of HealthTech accelerators over the past 10 years, their study is limited compared with accelerators in other fields, such as FinTech or EdTech. Involving the active collaboration of end users and wider stakeholders throughout the design process, co-design has been shown to improve HealthTech equity, safety, feasibility and likelihood of adoption. However, HealthTech accelerators rarely provide training and support for projects to use co-design frameworks, methods and mindsets. We argue that embedding more co-design practices into HealthTech accelerators is needed to ensure innovations are equitable and more likely to meet genuine user needs on a sustainable basis. Furthermore, such practices have the potential to speak to challenges identified in HealthTech accelerator studies, such as project difficulties with generating evidence for regulatory requirements and navigating tensions in professional identities. We acknowledge the logistical challenges of introducing co-design into fast-paced accelerator environments, including varying cohort maturity and skill sets. Drawing on emerging insights from the King’s MedTech Accelerator, we advocate, first, for a tailored approach to co-design training and support and, second, for further research to explore the value of co-design in maximising the impact of HealthTech innovations.