September 15, 2014
A team of engineering students in the Master of Engineering Management program participated in a project that explored ways to meet Grand Challenges. Read the Forbes article here.
The objective of this project was to assess the impact of exponential advances in sensors and computing technology on entrepreneurship, with a focus on one of the major grand challenges that humanity faces today, affordable healthcare. We documented the recent trends in healthcare industry and predicted future disruptions that may spur entrepreneurial growth. Based on a recent report by McKinsey & Company, health care is now the largest industry in the world. However, it is facing serious challenges in terms of future growth and product innovation. We focused on technologies such as Point-of-care devices (POC), Drug Delivery Systems and Organ-on-a-chip, which could break this logjam and evaluated their impact on the health care industry, in terms of cost and patient-physician relationship.
With Global biochips market expected to reach $11.4 billion by the year 2018 and POC market reaching $ 19 billion, the scope for entrepreneurs and investors in this field is enormous. Not to mention, these technologies will be solving some of the pressing issues, which majority of world’s population is currently facing.
As mentor of this project, Prof. Vivek Wadhwa said "I'm optimistic because technology is advancing so rapidly that we will start solving some of the Grand Challenges like hunger, poverty and energy. Not to say that we're going to clean everything up but we will have technological solutions to problems and then the challenge would be to implement them - which is much better than not having a solution at all!"
The team include MEM students Harsh Ambekar, Aditya Prathipati, and Apaar Sharma.
