With our pit stop check-in with IMD faculty and our first deliverable presentation to our start-up due next week, we are sprinting to finalize and polish our market analysis on clear dental aligners. We are a team of five with home countries of Switzerland, Nigeria, Brazil, India and the United States. Collectively as a group, we have professional experience in engineering, supply chain management, consulting, human resources and financial services.
Our start-up project is Bottmedical. We hope to meet Dr. Tino Töpper & Dr. Bekim Osmani (co-founders) in-person and tour the laboratory in Basel, Switzerland later in the year.
Bottmedical
Bottmedical is a start-up with a vision to use scientific research on thin-film technologies to disrupt the market of clear aligner therapies. The focus product NaturAligner® is a teeth alignment foil made from natural precursors that reduces microplastic bleach into the human body.
With a bio-conscious market in mind, the NaturAligner® brings attention to the microplastic contamination in conventional plastic teeth correction aligners. Finally, the second generation of the NaturAligner® is envisioned to reduce the plaque and odor formation through the incorporation of natural antimicrobial compounds.
No other clear aligner on the market is addressing these issues. This key innovation will lift the user experience and thus, their compliance in wearing the aligners and finally, will lead to their successful completion. As such, NaturAligner® 2.0 is a disruptive product that can create a new consumer attitude for natural-based dental medicine, in line with the current dynamics in cosmetic industries.
MBA team goal
As we plan our initial analysis for the clear aligner therapy, we will be diving into the dental correction industry to assess potential competitors, partners and product placement. Without prior knowledge and minimal information from our startup, the hope is to deliver an unbiased market analysis. Along the way, we plan to leverage a handful of frameworks and industry analysis guidelines.
That being said, our startup group schedule has looked a bit like this last week…
February 17th (15:30-19:30) Group Work
Although we planned for pizza and light beverages to groupthink and work on our market analysis, we worked in our study room until 22:00.
February 18th
After Rafael’s review of raw data on potential competition, our project scope was thoroughly debated late in the night. I woke up to an email Andri sent at midnight clarifying the latest amendment to the scope of our analysis.
February 19th – 20th
As for the last 24 hours between these days, I have pushed all my other coursework to focus on designing SWOT analyses for the major players in the clear aligner industry by scrubbing financial statements, websites and databases.
With a busy week ahead of us, we scheduled a team meeting on Monday to synthesize all of our research and prepare our presentation to Bottmedical and IMD faculty. We are planning to take a quick team break and walk on the shores of Lake Geneva to check-in with each other and review our journey on caring to dare each other, a key ingredient to transforming into a High-Performance team. Although we have been sprinting to our presentation and through Module 1, we return back to our core mission at IMD: To become better leaders today and tomorrow.
Alicia Gong (blog writer)
Andri Fritz, Temi Orekoya, Rafael Martins, Rohit Vattipalli
IMD Faculty Coach: Carlos Cordon
