Developing opportunities in digital health: The case of BioBeats Ltd

Abstract

Departing from established research on entrepreneurship, design-based entrepreneurship places an explicit emphasis on the entrepreneurial process as evolutionary and emergent in which knowledge and understanding of an opportunity are acquired incrementally by means of design and evaluation of alternative solutions. This paper develops a use case of BioBeats Ltd., a UK-based university spin-off which has successfully managed to turn an opportunity in digital health into a commercially viable enterprise. Adopting a design-based paradigm, the company under study started by building a technical solution informed by a set of design principles which subsequently allowed the company to convert the socio-technical nature of the opportunity into technological artefacts that were further refined and tested by means of real-world experiments with third parties and citizens.