Case Study: How Resilient Processes and Internal Collaboration Within Companies can Breed New Innovations - a SMP&CO Partners Experience
In order to create functional innovations that can address part of the COVID-19 pandemic, internal teams at SMP&CO Partners worked hard with other business units to create SEQu-SUITE - a health protection system, and integrate assets from Mica Health - a digital health platform.
The story of SEQu-SUITE and Mica Health are deeply intertwined with that directly of the Firm itself; albeit they existed in their own ecosystems; emergent and divergent innovations came together to create a new holistic solution to addressing the present and future health safety and security needs of the new Trust Economy.
The oldest of the solutions is Mica Health which started its life as a healthtech startup founded in 2015 by a team that also included Diego Manalastas and Julian Patdu, now senior partners at SMP&CO. Mica Health is a digital health platform designed with the needs of the emerging world in mind; ie. the lack of digital infrastructure, the low doctor-patient ratios, and difficulty in accessing qualified medical advice of any kind. The system integrated EMRs, Chatbots, Artificial Intelligence, Telemedicine, and various other innovations in the health tech space in order to offer a more accessible healthcare access system. In November 2015, Mica Health and the founding team were awarded by the Harvard Social Innovation Collaborative as Global Trailblazers; and in March 2016, was awarded the YouthHack Unicorn Award for the business concept of being both impactful and potentially profitable. Since that time, Mica Health has been absorbed into the SMP&CO Partners Investments Group as an internal business unit.
SEQu-SUITE is the younger of the two innovations, getting its start in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns here in Metro Manila. The motivation and premise of the R&D team was pretty simple; at some point the economy will need to reopen, and though hopefully significant portions of the economy would have been digitally transformed, there will be certain spaces and businesses that will always need in-person interactions such as logistics, agriculture, physical healthcare, and transportation among other industries. As such the R&D team created a set of solutions that fully integrate prevention, detection, and long-term business operating procedures to be more health secure; all the while cross-collaborating with various internal units at SMP&CO such as the business intelligence group, our logistics partners, and the investments group.
