Healthcare startups and ecosystems: Insights from an emerging market economy

Startups are a reflection of entrepreneurship and innovation in a given country context and have the potential for new venture creation to generate visible economic, social and political impacts and hence are often the focus of policy initiatives. However, designing such policies is a challenging task since often startups fail. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has brought the policy focus on healthcare and startups globally and there have been numerous policy initiatives to facilitate healthcare startups. However, there is very limited information on this specific startup sector and its implications for policies. Hence, this study proposes to fill this gap and explores the landscape of healthcare startups in India since the creation of India’s startup policy in 2016. Insights from this study have been used to create a conceptual framework for understanding the nature of gaps and their linkages in the startup lifecycle which has global applicability.