Understanding market opportunities for Virtual Reality in clinical education.

Inflection Point

A professional association for specialist physicians and allied health professionals had initiated a commercial partnership with a Virtual Reality (VR) start-up. The professional association saw the potential to reimagine hands-on clinical education by incorporating VR, while also creating a new revenue stream for the association. The VR start-up was refining product-market fit, and the partnership was an important opportunity to experiment with a new model.

How We Helped

Together, the start-up and professional association had an exciting new technology and ideas for how it could transform clinical education. They were missing a detailed understanding of how prospective institutional customers could derive value.

We worked with the professional society to understand the market opportunity and define initial hypotheses for market positioning. We conducted 33 in-depth interviews with clinical educators across the United States to understand their existing approach to hands-on education and how they incorporated new technologies into their curricula. Through the interviews, we explored multiple product configurations and identified the most salient selling features for different customer segments.

Outcomes

We delivered a comprehensive research summary, supplemented with tactical deliverables to support the society’s go-to-market approaches. We supported future sales efforts by delivering a curated list of sales prospects (drawn from our interview recruitment efforts), and a short summary deck for future business development conversations.

Our research was an important stepping stone in clarifying priorities for both ongoing product development and go-to-market efforts. In the two and a half years since the research was completed, the professional association has launched its first VR training offering, while also pursuing go-to-market tactics that surfaced in our recommendations.