The course that changed our lives - #consultingtime!

As we already mentioned, both of us (R. and L.) are in a PhD program in Bioengineering with a great focus on entrepreneurship, innovation and technology transfer. Within the program, we had a course for 6 months on product acceleration, which consisted of doing a real case of consulting on a product developed in academia and define the go-to-market strategy.


R. and L.

Our technology was at a very early stage, with no patent submitted yet and with a very fragile proof-of-concept, so we had to start with almost nothing! This was extremely challenging but we loved it so much!!!

The technology we were dealing with was based on engineered-exosomes as drug delivery systems. If you don't know what are exosomes, we can explain a bit (as always, any question is very welcome!): 

Exosomes are nanometer-sized vesicles that are derived from almost all eukaryotic cells, being natural carriers of different signaling molecules. These vesicles are biocompatible, stable in the bloodstream, they can cross biological barriers and as they are naturally produced by our cells, they have a low immunogenicity and toxicity.

Here you have a paper with more detailed information: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906597/!

As scientists, we had to adapt to a pitch like presentation instead of a formal scientific presentation so we could convince the audience that our product is worthy to invest. This could be very difficult when we are constantly presenting our scientific results in an extremely accurate way and our speech should be very formal.

So we thought to share with you some hints that our mentors gave us and some that we learned by ourselves during our experience on entrepreneurship and innovation:

1. Don't be afraid of speaking to people and introducing yourselves. If you have something to say or ask that means you are worthy of anybody's attention.

2. Open your mind! Don't be afraid to dream! Science sometimes is far away from the market but it takes vision to know where a to discover should head on.

3. Risk it! Go out there, expose your idea (carefully) and test the reaction. Receive the feedback and improve it!

4. Don't trust everyone. For an invention to reach the market a lot of money needs to be invested and that means negotiating and protecting your idea legally.

5. ENJOY! enjoy every moment of networking, pitching, group work, brainstorm, rushing to deadlines, dynamic group...INNOVATION!

L. and R. at the end of the presentation.
Now we are heading for the world out there, learning more about patents, business, and entrepreneurship. And thanks to this program and course we found something we really like to do!

Want to know more about this crazy adventure? Feel free to contact us! We are more than happy to share more with you guys. We really hope that everyone who is reading this post which is feeling down and unmotivated with the lab work and does not know what else can be done with science go out there and TRY IT!

Next, we will share more about our intellectual property course! Stay tuned for more :)




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