GSAS Harvard Biotech Club - Business Plan Competition: topic
This is a public forum
B-Plan Newbies/Veterans
Jessica Mar
Thursday, 05 April 2007 10:11 EDT
As one of the co-managing directors of the Biotech Club, we are incredibly excited for this year’s b-plan competition, especially as our lead-up events (like the kickoff next week) are starting to fall in place. But what about you?
As a scientist who has never strayed much from academic research, for me, participating in a b-plan comp sounds completely foreign (but fun!). For my boyfriend, the budding entrepreneur and winner of 2 comps already, he is definitely the veteran of our household.
I’m curious to know: how many of you have experience with b-plan comps? What are your thoughts? Positive? Useful? Stimulating?
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Replies
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So last Wednesday was the b-plan kick-off event, and my first experience into the world of start-up companies and biotechnology. It was fun for me because this is an entirely new area I had never considered before as a potential career option.
To be honest it was a little scary and intimidating listening to the speakers. These are highly successful people. A couple of them M.D./Ph.D’s. Am I like that? Could I be like that? I don’t know!
There were many new terms I had never heard of… ie CRO…???
But as the evening proceeded and especially during the mixer, where I got to interact with other people I started feeling a little better: some of the other academic-type people who were brave enough to share their blossoming ideas also expressed some doubts in the worth of the idea, in themselves on whether they could pull it off. Not that it is good to doubt yourself but it was nice in a selfish way to hear I am not alone.
On the opposite side I also had the opportunity to talk to some people coming from the business side of things, who were looking for academics with expertise – and that also made me feel good, because it highlighted that while I may not know everything about business one thing I do know is science and that I can talk about with ease.
Coming back from the mixer on the bus I was thinking to myself we really need to provide a place where business people and scientist can meet each other and talk, because I think we can really learn a lot from each other.
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I some times lose track of the acronyms during business talks too. I discovered I can confuse IP and IPO when they are in the same talk. I want to add one more party to Paula’s hypothetical meeting place for scientists and business people; engineers. Some of the questions on my mind are “how to do it” questions.
Paulas comment also invites some advertising for the company profile group we are putting together.
If some folks out there are interested in researching and/or learning more about how biotech companies are run, finance issues, the nature of their R&D, employment, or if you have some other ideas you want to post about biotech companies, check out:
http://network.nature.com/boston/forums/www.thebiotechclub.org/49
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