Team:Bulgaria/Entrepreneurship
Being the first Bulgarian iGEM team was not an easy task. Sponsoring scientific research and projects in our country is not a common practice so the realization of our project would not have been possible without our entrepreneurship and marketing flair. The lack of money and the approaching deadline for registration motivated us to split the team in two workgroups. The first group was mostly concentrated in research and planning the biology work, whereas the second group was responsible for the popularization of the project and provision of financial resources for iGEM Bulgaria. Social networks’ profiles for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Indiegogo were developed and designed for different target groups. To optimize our organization and make our work flexible we used the online platforms Trello and Slack.
Our business plan was to create a product out of the iGEM idea and to sell it to companies as well as to individuals. For that we created a social campaign that aimed (and still aims) to convince more young Bulgarians to stay in our country, do science and fearlessly work for achieving their goals. Our enthusiasm drew the attention of several big media and soon we had our first donations. However, the amount of money raised was not enough so we took a risk and invested some of the money in T-shirts with our logo and moto. The idea was to create an additional possibility for revenue generation through direct sells and reinvestment in more T-shirts.
This strategy provided us the required money and we successfully registered for the competition. Our media broadcasts continued and as a result a Bulgarian employee in Thermofisher saw us and convinced the company to give us the consumables we needed to begin our work. As we gathered popularity we started offering different companies opportunities for sponsorship and partnership. We guaranteed them advertisement and involvement in an exciting and innovative project. As a result we established a long term partnership with the major biotech industry in Bulgaria, namely BioVet, which also supported us financially. We proved that iGEM could be sold as a social and scientific project and we believe that the brand could be used in future for the next competitions to come. This way we accomplished not only our immediate goal to raise the money necessary for the project, but also the aim of our campaign to provide opportunities for young people. Now the Bulgarian business community is more open towards collaboration with young scientists working on cutting-edge projects. We are convinced that this new attitude could trigger a whole new phase in the economic development of Bulgaria.
