Over the summer, I worked as an intern at Neopenda, a medtech startup that designs innovative and needs-based medical products for low-resource settings. Neopenda was in the stage of launching its wearable patient monitoring device, the Neoguard, and wanted to know how best to price for their product in various African markets. My primary task was to develop a recommended pricing strategy for the device; this involved interviewing customers, studying the competitive landscape, and estimating expected benefits for their customers. As the product was still in the nascent stages of commercialization, I also helped to define the device, service, and data components of their product, and conducted research on what kind of pricing model would be best for them to launch and grow with. Since Neopenda is a health care social enterprise operating in Africa, we also considered other factors, such as the level of digital maturity in the country and pricing affordably to maximize impact.

There were several topics covered in the Core curriculum that helped me in my internship. Core Managerial Economics taught us about the concepts of pricing to maximize profits and associated ethical considerations. The Core Marketing class stressed the need to understand customers’ willingness to pay for different product features. Both these classes taught topics that turned out to be very useful during my internship. Furthermore, the Foundations of Entrepreneurship class gave me more exposure to financial modeling and breakeven analysis, important concepts for a startup.

One of the challenges was that I had limited experience working in the development and medical equipment industries. At the start of the internship, I did a lot of research in order to get up to speed and come up with a suitable recommendation. Data on developing countries is furthermore not widely available online. Since Neopenda’s primary market is developing countries, it was challenging to find the right sources for information particularly on the health care industry. Interviews with distributors and health care providers turned out to be very insightful and helped steer us in the right direction. By the end of my internship, I felt that I had gained a lot of new knowledge and hearing how happy the CEO was with the final report and the clarity it brought to a previously ambiguous area was the cherry on top of the internship experience.

I have always been interested in learning about how social enterprises can deliver impact and be self-sustainable at the same time. Going into the internship, I had the goal of applying my data and analytics work experience along with the business skills I learned at CBS to drive impact in the real world. I was also curious to learn about bringing a digital product to market in Sub-Saharan Africa, a market I heard had a growing tech entrepreneurship community but was mostly new to me. Interning at Neopenda through SESF allowed me to achieve all these goals over the course of a summer. In addition to the new knowledge I gained on social enterprises, medtech, and emerging markets, the internship helped me realize the usefulness of having a background in data analytics and allowed me to further enhance my business strategy skills specifically in commercializing a new medical products.