“In Switzerland, we are not aggressive enough”

Mr. Claesson, when one speaks of digitalisation or Industry 4.0, hardly anyone thinks of the health sector. A mistake?
Ulf Claesson: Absolutely. Digitalisation is not a future issue for the life sciences; we are right in the middle now. Take electronic health records: they have been around for more than 10 years. Today, however, we are trying to make more use of them.

An example is Clinerion, one of the start-ups that you lead as CEO. What does it do?
Clinerion is a platform that enables recruitment of patients for clinical trials. Although we are comparatively young, we will have access to 80 million patients through contracts with hospitals around the world by the end of the year. The platform allows companies that perform clinical tests find suitable candidates in minutes, even if they must comply with various criteria simultaneously. Incidentally, we leave the data where it is – in the hospitals – and do not upload it. This allows us to ensure patient privacy and manage most regulatory hurdles.

You yourself have an IT background, but you are active in the healthcare market. As an IT specialist, what do you see as the biggest challenge in this market?
For IT people like me, the pace in the healthcare sector needs some getting used to. With our start-up, everything is going much slower than we thought when writing the business plan, even though Clinerion is my 12th start-up.

Traditionally, Switzerland is not an IT country. How big is this disadvantage in digitalisation in the life sciences?
Switzerland’s chances of being involved at the front line of digitalisation are very good. You see, IT is not a separate sector any more; it has become an enabler. A country does not necessarily need large IT companies in order to play a leading role in digitalisation. When it comes to start-ups, we have nothing to fear. Last year, 50 spin-offs were established in the ETH domain; this is a remarkable figure in comparison with other top universities around the world.

Do you see challenges too for Switzerland?
We can not rest on our laurels – nobody will wait for us if we do not move fast enough. Our competitors are not only the established life sciences clusters, such as Boston, but also countries that can implement exciting approaches without any legacy issues. The area where Clinerion is active, clinical research, has long since been discovered as a huge and strategic market by countries such as the UK, Turkey, the Baltic states and, more recently, Brazil. Compared with the global competition, we are not aggressive enough in Switzerland.

But Clinerion’s competitors are not likely to come from emerging countries, but from the US?
That’s true. Our main competitor comes from the Boston region – and it can find substantially more risk capital there than we can here in Switzerland.

How do you see the risk capital situation in Switzerland?
We have a Series B problem. Not enough money for growth goes to Swiss start-ups. This is a pity, because otherwise the conditions are very good. The only bottleneck is the money.

How might this change?
Tax incentives could be established for start-up investment. The UK has already done this: there’s a whole bundle of tax incentives for investment in companies listed on AIM, the market on the London Stock Exchange for growth companies. If we had something like this, the start-up scene would go like a rocket in no time at all.

We talked to Ulf Claesson on the eve of Biotech Digitization Day, which focused on the theme of digitalisation in the healthcare sector.

Ulf Claesson
For over 25 years, Ulf Claesson has created and rapidly built sustainable businesses for large corporations, industrial investors and VCs in the Americas, Europe and Asia. Ulf has a senior executive background with Hewlett-Packard and IBM, he managed spin-outs from Intuit and Ericsson, and has initiated more than a dozen merger & acquisition transactions to-date.

He is currently member of European & US company boards, innovation initiatives, and partner companies: Foundation Board Director of AO Foundation, Board Director of avast software and jumpshot, inc., CEO and Board Director of Clinerion Ltd., Chairman Coaching Acceptance Board of Commission for Innovation and Technology CTI.