If you actually read the paper and look at the pie charts, it is clear that the study is not that relevant to SNDY. The student's paper was limited to data collected on 237 "acquisitions" from 2002 to 2007 and of those companies only enough information was available for 72 of them to put in the study.
Of those 72 acquisitions in the study, only a very small percentage were in the same field of medical devices similar to Solo. Most were CE Marks in other medical device fields.