Team:Manchester/Business Plan
Business Plan
- We prepared a business plan to describe the steps that we would take to develop our project into a useful product.
- Our business plan outlines essential activities for attracting investors and for easing the management of our development process.
- We developed a business strategy and an investment case, based on information we obtained during our market research.
Introduction
Our business plan activities identify initial proposed mechanisms by which we could develop our project into a useful product. Our business plan also allows us to assess the chances of our possible enterprise to succeed and to attract investments for our development. The business plan will be updated once our project continues with laboratory activities after the Covid lockdown and more commercially vital information becomes available. For now, our business plan is mainly based on our dry lab activities, in particular insights from our human practices and business report.
The complete business plan is available for download as a PDF document.
Completed Work
We developed our business plan based on studying the potential demand for our product in the sun care market. We also tried to predict possible risks for our business and possible strategies to avoid or to mitigate weaknesses. Furthermore, we planned review points during the development process and key milestones that would allow us to assess whether to change our strategy or even to close the business to avoid further losses.
Overview of the market
- The suncare market is worth approximately 11.6 billion dollars and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 2.4% per year.
- The suncare market includes various skin care products to protect from sun exposure and to allow sunless tanning.
Description of the product
- Bacteria producing compounds naturally occurring in hippopotamus sweat, hipposudoric acid.
- Hipposudoric acid acts as the hippo’s sunscreen during long days exposing their hairless skin to the tropical sun and has additional benefits that consumers might be interested in such as antimicrobial activity.
Competitive advantages of our product
- Additional benefits, such as antimicrobial activity.
- Limited risk to the environment (coral bleaching) and to the consumer’s skin, unlike conventional UV filters.
- Meets the demand for an eco-friendly UV filter, which is currently is unsatisfied.
Aims of our enterprise
- Develop bacteria producing hipposudoric acid efficiently and secure the intellectual property in this technology.
- Sell the technology to a company producing personal care products.
- Continue developing other useful products from hipposudoric acid.
Revenue streams
- Licensing of Intellectual Property.
- Sale of the company.
- Strategic alliances with skin care manufacturers.
Purpose of investment
- Development, characterisation and optimisation of production of hipposudoric acid from bacteria.
Conclusion
- The demand for sun care and especially eco-friendly sun care is growing.
- We showed in our in silico studies that there is a high chance of engineered bacteria being capable of producing hipposudoric acid.
- The development process has already been planned and can resume quickly after the end of social distancing regulations.
