Team:Manchester/Contribution

Overview

Project

Description Medals Project Values Safety Engineering success Results and Future Steps Implementation Wiki Study

Human Practices

Introduction Surveys Interviews YouTube Analysis Responsibility and Reflections

Modelling

Model Pathway Design Flux Balance Analysis Chemical Analysis

Entrepreneurship

Introduction Business Report Business Plan Learning Resource

Team

Our Team Partnership Collaborations Journal Attributions

Judging Form ☰

Essential Entrepreneurship Learning Resource

• Our Essential Entrepreneurship learning resource is a comprehensive guide for iGEM teams starting to integrate entrepreneurship into their project.
• It is important to improve integration of entrepreneurship into iGEM projects because many products fail because of poor commercial viability rather than a bad concept.
• Our comprehensive learning guide describes numerous useful business techniques to overcome this issue.
• A webinar summarising our learning resource was presented at the global iGEM meet-up on 22nd of August 2020.

Rationale for creating the learning resource

We were inspired by the use learning resource of the 2018 Bielefeld-CeBiTec team, thus we decided to create our own learning resource that would help other iGEM teams to overcome significant challenges. We identified an integration of entrepreneurship as a major potential challenge that many teams might have, as we did not see many teams integrate significant elements of entrepreneurship into their projects. Additionally, we realised that new product development is not an easy process, because a majority of new products fail (Media Relations Agency,2020). Therefore, we wanted to ensure that as many iGEM projects as possible produce inventions that would be appreciated by the general public and could even create jobs by turning into start-ups. Furthermore, our team found integration of entrepreneurship into our project helpful. We wanted to help other iGEM teams by creating a comprehensive learning resource that covered the basics of entrepreneurship, from a specific iGEM'er perspective, to make it easy for other iGEM teams to incorporate entrepreneurship into their projects as early as possible.

What did we do to make it easy for other iGEM teams to integrate essential entrepreneurship?

We created a learning resource consisting of several modules essential for iGEM, which cover numerous aspects of how to incorporate entrepreneurship into iGEM project. The modules within the resource cover processes such as a market research, consumer positioning, and PEST and SWOT analysis. The learning resource also contains success stories from previous iGEM teams to provide inspiration for future projects. We also hosted a webinar summarising the content of our resource at the iGEM global meetup. The webinar aimed to:

• advertise our Essential Entrepreneurship resource;
• provide a summary of the information to the teams that could not complete the resource;
• inform the teams about the scope and benefits of our resource is;
• answer any questions that iGEM teams might have about entrepreneurship, to help us refine our learning resource.

Overall, the webinar increased awareness of the iGEM community about our resource and confirmed that the content of our resource was likely to be comprehensive enough. The webinar can be accessed by clicking on the following link.

The learning resources

The learning resource can be downloaded

here

Upon sending us the picture of a team going through the learning resource and completion of the resource, the team would receive the ribbon that the team can upload on their wiki. Please, send your pictures of your team completing the resource to igem2020manchester@gmail.com.The ribbon will act as evidence that a team has considered how to integrate entrepreneurship into their project and how to maximise the benefit of their project to society.

How has learning essential enterprise helped our team?

Overall, the incorporation of essential entrepreneurship into our project allowed us to ensure that the benefits of our project to the society would be maximised and that our project would be commercially feasible. For example, incorporation of a value proposition into our project planning ensured that the project would bring benefit to society and match the expectations of consumers.

How did we build our resource?

We created most content for our learning resource by summarising relevant information from one of the business modules taught at the University of Manchester. We discussed our ideas about the resource with our supervisor. We also held a meeting with the chair as well as co-chair of iGEM’s Entrepreneurship Program Innovation Community (EPIC) to get advice on how to make our resource more relevant to iGEM. We followed advice from our supervisor and EPIC committee and incorporated examples of how business methods described in our resource were used by iGEM teams in the past.

How can our resources be improved?

We tried to make the resource as complete as possible, but there were a lot of aspects of entrepreneurship that we did not have any experience with. For example, we did not have significant experience on how to write a good business pitch. We also experienced time constraints, so we could not build the resource that covered all the aspects that we consider essential parts of entrepreneurship. Therefore, we would appreciate it if in the coming years other teams will build on our resource to increase the usefulness and coverage of this essential learning resource.

References

Literature

Kocina, (2017). What percentage of new products fail and why? Available at: https://www.publicity.com/marketsmart-newsletters/percentage-new-products-fail/#:~:text=The%20usual%20answer%20is%20somewhere,goods%20(CPG)%20industry%20fail (Accessed: 29/09/2020).

igem2020manchester@gmail.com