On 26th June, Insider London were proud to organise a full day of company visits for a diverse team and engaged team from Roche. Delegates visited three very different companies for fresh insight into agility and intrapreneurship from a variety of speakers.

Health Foundry

The day began at Health Foundry, a vibrant community of 200 members, created to support and accelerate digital innovation in healthcare. Programme Manager, Nicky Johnston, explained the distinctive challenges faced by start-ups in the healthtech sector, including the differences between companies who sell B2B/B2C and those who enter the NHS market as well as the differences between transactional and transformational start-ups. She further explained how Health Foundry nurtures and supports their community, rounding off the session with success stories and a Q&A.

Next up was the CEO and founder of Healum, Jonathan Abraham, who shared both his personal journey and his company life-cycle. Healum allows users to create health plans with a team of healthcare professionals. Respecting the views and rights of the user as an intelligent and well-informed individual, Healum asserts that everyone has the right to personalised health-care. Appreciating the challenges faced by the modern medic, Healum also assists professionals using automation, machine learning and peer review of the algorithm.

Having formerly worked for Google, Jonathon also shared unique insight into lessons learnt from working in an innovative tech giant and how to transfer these concepts and strategies into a different business.

Last but not least at the Health Foundry, Becks Armstrong, the CEO and founder of Clarity took to the stage. With 850 million women to go through menopause in the next three years and doctors’ lack of specific training in menopause care, Clarity caters for a gap in the market. In the process of creating a menopause tracking app, Clarity has made fantastic traction in a taboo subject and is currently working with Imperial College to bring out the app in Alpha before the end of 2019.

RocketSpace

After an informal networking session, a quick tour of the space and some well-deserved lunch, the group headed over to Islington for the second visit of the day. The group arrived at the fresh new London edition of the San Francisco tech hub, RocketSpace – the breeding ground of Uber, Spotify and Hootsuite.

Duncan Logan, CEO and Founder of RocketSpace, discussed the transition from an industrial past to a digital future as well as the difference in mindset between the start-up and the corporate. Leading on from this, Duncan stressed the importance of understanding the differences between disruption and innovation, and explained why setting up an accelerator programme is far from the magic bullet for corporate innovation.

Delegates then had the opportunity to pick the brains of Hermant Maini and Sam Scott who work with big corporates to promote ideation and intrapreneurship strategies, often pairing corporates with the most innovative start-ups to make waves in traditional sectors. Discussing problems and solutions to promoting agility in the health sector and beyond, topics included both internal and external innovation, feedback loop strategies, AB testing and company culture.

Wazuko

The final session of the day took place in the heart of the City at the HQ of Wazuko – a favourite with Waitrose, the Ministry of Defence and HSBC. Fighting the tendency to treat ideas with less importance than sales and marketing leads, this scalable platform promotes the concept of everyday innovation and access to different areas of ideation. Bringing the structure without losing the creativity, Wazuko promotes inter-regional communication, showcase previous success and develops ideas in a transparent and accessible way.

We would like to extend an enormous thank you to all our wonderful speakers for this memorable and action-packed day, as well as to the fantastic Roche delegates for making this day so memorable. We look forward to the next edition.