“It’s hard for me to stay still.”

On his morning commute, Bipin Bhola is often tapping away on his phone, refining an interactive artificial intelligence math tool he is building for his younger son.

It is one of several projects occupying the scientist, entrepreneur and educator. By day, Bipin oversees the operations of Kaleidoscope Therapy Group, a paediatric therapy company, as its chief operating officer. At Duke-NUS, where he is an assistant professor with the Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, he works with students to help them turn unmet healthcare needs into possible solutions.

On Wednesday evenings, this often means staying at the School until around 10pm to  mentor teams of students from the Duke-NUS Health Innovator Programme (D-HIP), which he helped build from the earliest days.

"Bipin is there all the time because he is so passionate about their wellbeing. One student described him as the soul of D-HIP."

Asst Prof Rena Dharmawan

“I’m more than happy to come in and spend time with them,” he says. “We just have fun.”

But D-HIP is only one expression of the mindset Bipin hopes to cultivate. For him, innovation does not begin with an impressive technology, a business plan or even an ingenious idea. It begins with understanding the problem and the people who live with it.

“They have to fall in love with the problem first,” he says. “They have to understand what the problem is and how to deconstruct it.”

That conviction has been shaped by a career spanning engineering, science, business and healthcare, as well as by experiences that have made innovation deeply personal.

Learning how to think

Bipin grew up surrounded by nuclear scientists and engineers. His father worked as an engineer at an atomic research facility in India, and conversations at home frequently revolved around how things worked.

During walks besides the railway tracks, his father would point to the stones beneath them and ask: “What do you think these stones are for? How can such a huge train ride along these tracks?” 

Those exchanges nurtured an instinct to question, investigate and take things apart mentally before trying to put them back together.

After completing an engineering degree at the University of Mumbai, Bipin’s family encouraged him to pursue postgraduate studies in the United States. Doing so required almost all the money from his father’s retirement payout, enough to cover only his first few semesters at the University of Southern California.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out,” his mother told him.

Bipin took on whatever work he could find, including jobs as a stock boy, football coach and crew member at a pretzel shop.

The pretzel shop would unexpectedly change the direction of his life.

One of its regular customers was a university professor.

“Café latte. One cream, two sugars. I still remember,” Bipin says with a smile.

Curious about the professor’s work, Bipin began asking him which course he would be teaching and enrolling in them the following semester. Their conversations eventually led to a position in the professor’s laboratory and three months later, an opportunity to join the department’s PhD programme with fully sponsored tuition

The financial relief was significant, but the intellectual freedom proved even more transformative. 

Falling in love with the problem

In the laboratory, Bipin explored physical, chemical and biological systems, and began looking at biology through the eyes of a physicist.

Suddenly, a subject he had once found intimidating, with “too many long names and too many things to draw”, became a source of fascination.

One project challenged him to detect a single virus within a solution.

“That was when my love for health and biology began,” he says. “It came quite late in my life.”

His PhD advisor also gave him a definition of education that Bipin still carries with him.

When Bipin asked how he would know that he was ready to graduate, he replied: “You are ready not when you have published papers or patents, but when I am convinced that you know how to think.”

The answer changed how Bipin viewed both his own training and his later role as an educator.

 
Innovation at the interfaces

After completing his studies, Bipin moved to Singapore to work as a scientist at A*STAR’s then Data Storage Institute.

But it was a later role at Nitto Denko, where he helped move medical devices towards commericalisation—that drew him decisively into healthcare innovation.

“Being on the ground and talking to doctors about their daily challenges really drilled into me the importance of understanding the clinical need before trying to build a solution,” he says.

He continued expanding his perspectives through an MBA and the Singapore-Stanford Biodesign Programme. These experiences gave him more than a set of commercialisation tools. They showed him how much stronger innovation could become when people with very different expertise worked together.

During his MBA, one lecturer made a particularly lasting impressing: Associate Professor Alok Mishra.

“His was the only course in my entire MBA that made sense to me,” Bipin jokes. “It was structured, logical and opened up what marketing really is.”

Alok’s perspective of the key ingredients needed for a successful medtech venture—a clinician who understood real-world need, an engineer who could build the solution and a business professional who could navigate the market—resonated with Bipin.

“What he said stayed with me for years, that innovation is the most impactful at interfaces of disciplines,” says Bipin.

This principle became central to his work. Health problems rarely fall neatly within a single discipline, and neither do the solutions. Innovation therefore depends as much on building the right team and asking the right questions as it does on technical expertise.

Bipin would later teach alongside Alok in the NUS Lean LaunchPad programme and work with him on a range of innovation and public health initiatives. Their collaborations have included efforts to improve the detection of nasopharyngeal cancer in Vietnam and understand how tuberculosis is managed in the Philippines.

The same multidisciplinary thinking would eventually underpin D-HIP.

 
When purpose becomes personal

In 2017, Bipin and his collaborators launched NUS Jumpstart, a university-based medical device commercialisation programme supporting a portfolio of over 30 companies.

Through the programme, he founded Neuroplay, a paediatric therapy company supporting children with developmental needs, including autism.

Its mission resonated personally as Bipin’s elder son is autistic.

At the time, Bipin had already moved firmly into the medtech space and was working as an assistant director with the SingHealth Office of Innovation. His career appeared to be moving along a clear trajectory.

Then his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

This diagnosis prompted the couple to reconsider how they wanted to spend their time and what kind of work mattered most to them.

“I remember discussing with my wife, ‘What do we want to spend our lives doing?” he recalls.

Neuroplay suddenly represented more than an interesting business or innovation project. It offered a chance to devote his experience to a mission closely connected to his own family.

So he took the decisive step of acquiring its shares and assuming responsibility for its operations. In 2024, the company merged with Kaleidoscope, a well-established premium private paediatric therapy clinic in Singapore, to form the Kaleidoscope Therapy Group.

"Being on the ground and talking to doctors about their daily challenges really drilled into me the importance of understanding the clinical need before trying to build a solution,"

Asst Prof Bipin Bhola

“This was more fulfilling than what I had been doing,” he says. “I could do 100 other things, but I’m stuck with this because it is something quite close to our hearts. It is my bread and butter now.”

The work has also given Bipin first-hand insight into the realities that innovators must eventually confront. Building something useful involves far more than producing a prototype. It demands difficult decisions, financial discipline, persistence, empathy and the willingness to adjust when real life refuses to follow the original plan.

These are lessons he now brings into the classroom.

 
More than one programme

D-HIP began with an ambitious idea shared by Bipin and Assistant Professor Rena Dharmawan: bring medical, engineering and business students together and help them tackle real gaps in patient care.

There were no guarantees that the model would work.

“I’m naturally an optimist,” says Bipin. “If we succeed, we will impact a lot of people. And even if we fail, at least our understanding becomes better.”

Rather than waiting for perfect conditions, they focused on demonstrating what the programme could achieve.

“I remember telling Rena, ‘Let’s create some outcomes and results, and then let the funders come to you’.”

That approach worked. D-HIP has since grown into a nine-month flagship programme, brought in industry collaborators and helped several student teams move their innovations closer to real-world application.