KEY SUCCESS FACTORS DRIVE LIFE SCIENCES STARTUPS IN THAILAND

Abstract

Life Sciences or health-care and medical startup is a global trend toward new innovative industries. In Thailand, there are numbers of life sciences startups are born each year. However, the life sciences business characteristic and business model that differ from other businesses urge the needs to understand the factors of success relevant or influence the stages of development. This understanding may be used to mitigate the risks of failure and, consequently, increase their success. Therefore, this study explored the critical success factors that influencing success, and factors that are most important at different stages of development. This study has followed a series of steps to provide a systemic, transparent and reproducible methodology through quantitative methods. The researcher developed a survey questionnaire to find the relationship of important variables and used the data from the 240 samples analysed basic statistic and confirmatory second order factor analysis based on the principle of latent variables in Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).It was found that the success of life sciences startups in each development stage comes from various factors with different influences. During the seed or incubation stage, the most important factor is human capital, followed by startup support and culture. Meanwhile in the early stage, the most important factor is startup support, followed by human capital and culture. During the growth stage, the finance factor contributes to success the most, followed by the market factor and human capital factor, while during the expansion stage, human capital is the most important, followed by culture and market factor.