Interview: Ian Stevens, chief executive of Touch Bionics

As captain of rugby side London Irish in the 1990s – before the start of the professional era – Stevens is no stranger to leadership roles, whether it’s inspiring his fellow forwards or cheering on the backs.

Now Stevens is tackling a different kind of opponent: restoring freedom and self-confidence to patients who have lost hands or fingers through disease or accident. He joined the company as chief executive in May and last week sealed a deal to pump £2.5 million of funding into the firm from business angel syndicate Archangel and the Scottish Investment Bank’s venture fund.

Stevens is no stranger to Archangel or to the Scottish medical technology scheme. He joined Dunfermline-based eye scanner outfit Optos – Archangel’s first investment – in 1998 as financial director and was later chief executive of Mpathy, a Glasgow-based medical mesh maker in which the angels’ syndicate also held a stake.

Last year’s £22m sale of Mpathy to Danish company Coloplast was heralded as an “important milestone” for Scottish angel investors, with the transaction triggering an £11.8m payment for Archangel, which had invested £5.6m in the firm. Archangel had introduced Stevens to Mpathy and, after he had stayed with the new owner for a few months to make sure the transition ran smoothly, the syndicate then paired him up with Touch Bionics.

“They certainly knew what they were getting with me,” laughs Stevens. “I know Archangel chief executive John Waddell and chairman Gavin Gemmell well and I think that helps the relationship.”

Working at Touch Bionics has also reunited Stevens with chief financial officer Jill McGregor, who had previously worked with him at Optos.

“I’d moved to the States to run Optos’ North American operations by the time Jill joined the company, but it’s good to be working with her again,” he says.

America has featured prominently in Stevens’s career: as well being general manager for Optos’ business on the continent, he also spent about half of his time at Mpathy in the US, a routine that is being repeated with Touch Bionics. He says: “I stay in a hotel near our company’s US head office in Columbus, Ohio, when I’m in town. There’s no point in buying a house in the States because my trips don’t always take me to Ohio.

“I need to be out with sales staff in the field to bring them information from head office and to take back experience from customers.

“The US isn’t just the world’s biggest healthcare market but it’s also an important place when it comes to introducing new technology into the marketplace. Patients have a much bigger say in their treatments.”

Those new medical technologies have been a key theme running through Stevens’s career. After a spell in the Royal Air Force – “working in computer analysis and playing a lot of rugby” – he trained as a chartered accountant, doing his articles with KPMG.

Then healthcare advances started playing a major role in his working life, with Stevens taking a job with Optos.

“Douglas Anderson, the company’s founder, owned a four-bedroom house in Dunfermline and that’s where the firm was based,” explains Stevens. “I wasn’t even in the house though, my first office was in a portable cabin outside instead.

“Douglas’s son had a detached retina and lost the sight in one eye. But the doctors couldn’t give Douglas enough information about what was going on in his son’s eyes because they couldn’t see inside them properly and so that prompted Douglas to invent the technology used by Optos.

“The same was true with James Browning – he left a job with Johnson & Johnson to invent a better mesh for treating pelvic prolapse, and that became the basis for Mpathy.”

Stevens has encountered the same situation again at Touch Bionics, where technology invented by David Gow at the National Health Service during the 1980s and 1990s led to the creation of “i-limb”, the world’s first commercially-available bionic hand.

In 2003, Touch became the first company to be spun out of the NHS in Scotland, attracting Scottish Executive seed funding in the process.

“I don’t see myself as an entrepreneur,” says Stevens. “I’m a businessman who is lucky enough to work with all these great inventions that can change people’s lives.

“Sometimes in Scotland we’re great at inventing things but we need more people who can invent them and then take them to market.”

Bringing Touch Bionics products to a wider audience is now Stevens’s focus, with last week’s cash injection fuelling the company’s expansion plans.

“At the moment, we only have a low, single-digit share of the market in the US, so there’s plenty for us to go at,” admits Stevens. The company currently turns over about £10m a year and has about 80 staff, split between Scotland and the US.

America was also the setting for last month’s launch of the upgraded version of the i-limb and the “virtu-limb”, a computer simulation tool for training doctors and patients to use the artificial hand.

The firm used the American Orthotic & Prosthetic Association National Assembly in Las Vegas to also unveil an image-capture system to make its “livingskin” covering for its devices to look more realistic and better match a patient’s own skin tone. The skin is made by a company in New York state, which the Scottish business bought in 2008.

“One of my aims is to build up our work with doctors so that they can train the patients to use the artificial hands and fingers,” explains Stevens. “It’s like any technology – you need to be trained so that you can get the best out of it.”

BACKGROUND

BORN in Belfast in 1963, Ian Stevens was educated at the city’s Royal Academy before reading economics at Edinburgh University.

After a spell in the Royal Air Force, he trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG at Oxford and Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Stevens joined Dunfermline-based eye scanner maker Optos in 1998 as financial director and then moved to the United States in 2003 to become the general manager of the firm’s North American business.

He was appointed as chief executive of Glasgow-based medical mesh maker Mpathy in 2007 and guided the company through its £22 million sale last year to Danish suitor Coloplast, in what was heralded as a “landmark deal” for Scottish business angels, who had invested in the company.

Stevens took up his new post as chief executive of Touch Bionics, the Livingston-based artificial hand maker, in May and last week secured £2.5m of funding for the firm.