Two years ago, I have started working with two scientists on a spin-off project in the fields of microarray, electrical biochips and bioinstrumentation.
The company to be spun off serves to commercialize a technology, one of the two scientists pioneered in his Ph.D.-thesis. The technology involves the implementation of gold-nanostructured microarrays for the detection of DNA and small molecules. So far we went from kitchen-table to project-status.
In this entry I will discuss the obstacles we encountered before we could think of actually founding a company.
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Life Science Business Development by Martin Pohle
Oh money, where art thou? Building successful businesses in Life Sciences. A hands-on weblog with real-world business scenarios. Everybody is invited to share and comment.
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Business Scenario 2: Biochips
- Date:
- Monday, 02 Apr il 2007 - 11:37 UTC
Last updated: Monday, 02 Apr 2007 - 11:37 UTC
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Comments
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LESSON 1: MANAGE IP!!
Only God knows, how neccessary these two exclamation marks are! Please, please, please: manage your intellectual property. It is the most important contribution you can make when founding a company. Iron-clad IP with clearly defined property rights is an absolute must. Fussing around or letting IP go to finance further research projects is an absolute no-no. You have to know in advance what you want to do with the knowledge and technology you generate: wether you want to sell it off, because it is just a by-product or if it can serve as a keystone for a business. Your business, by the way. If you can spare money, please have the value of your IP assessed professionally. It could be the best investment you ever made.
In our case, parts of the IP were sold to a company in the Netherlands. Now it falls short with the royalty payments and we are struggling to get the IP back. This thing is still not straight, in order to get it this way, there are some headaches and mishaps yet to come. But I am optimistic, so far we can rely on a 5-year non-exclusive license, which is something to build on. But still, it’s not the real thing, and our original IP is still aloof.