Difference between revisions of "Team:Ionis Paris/Entrepreneurship"
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<p>We will here try to summarize these appointments and to synthetize what we learnt from them:</p> | <p>We will here try to summarize these appointments and to synthetize what we learnt from them:</p> | ||
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<p><u>Companies involved:</u> Le FlyLab, Civic Drone, BlackFoot</> | <p><u>Companies involved:</u> Le FlyLab, Civic Drone, BlackFoot</> | ||
Revision as of 14:30, 16 October 2016
During our iGEM adventure, we deeply investigated how to make our project better. Afterall our in-depth thinking about Applied Design, we thought that our project had the potential to become a real company, if the laboratory results allowed it. We therefore immediately started to reach out for companies and incubators. We designed a flyer, set up a presentation and pitch, and took appointments with a lot of professionals, in order to present our project. These appointments had two major purposes: To obtain help and sponsoring in order to realize our project: as our team is not linked to any public institutions, we cannot access public funds, and need to raise all the project’s funds by ourselves. We were looking for laboratory equipment, money, licenses and keys for softwares, etc… To get advices and tips about real-world applications of our project from people working in the air pollution/drone measurements sector. As our innovation was something that has never been seen before, we wanted to be sure that we could enter the market and exploit our project’s potential to its maximum. Though we did not get any official sponsoring to fund the whole project at once, we still had a lot of help from different companies. We therefore gathered a lot of opinions about Quantifly, some of them so helpful that they made us discover potential applications that we never suspected before! We also learnt a lot about where our project needed improvement: for example, we would need to be able to detect pollutants other than toluene. We will here try to summarize these appointments and to synthetize what we learnt from them: Companies involved: Le FlyLab, Civic Drone, BlackFoot
We have been thinking of several ways of commercializing Quantifly data. We first thought of selling a service instead of a product as we know that genetically modified organisms cannot be handled by non-experts. A data collection service could be established for the government, companies or even individuals in which a technician comes to perform on site measurements. The data is then made accessible to the customer. Secondly, we considered the idea of changing the bacterial container and replacing the drone for outdoor monitoring by an indoor sensor in the format of a smoke detector. This detector will be placed in public places and be renewed often by specialized employees. We also imagined creating a network-connected object that will give real time information on the air quality at the street level by a mobile application like the Plume lab app. Plume lab is a company that aims to give information on air pollution to the general public (see the Plume labswebsite for more informations) Last but not least, the greatest advantages of biosensors is their adjustability. Indeed, a single specific pollutant can be targeted by changing the VOC sensitive bacteria. Our on field measurement system will open up the new possibilities for environmental monitoring. Any environmental pollutant could be detected using the appropriate genetic sequences. Quantifly is a cheap, sensitive, flexible and versatile tools for pollutant detection.Entrepreneurship
Gathering the feedbacks of all these professionals unveiled a lot of potential for our project, and a lot of them were interested to see our Proof of Concept. At the end of the competition, we were even contacted by some companies that wanted to install our sensor on their product, or that wanted to establish partnerships and install their technology on our drone !
In parallel, we also went to see the National Institute of Intellectual Property to get advices of how to protect our project.
Finally, these professional appointments have advanced our iGEM project and brought us many interesting business contacts to give an entrepreneurial dimension to our project. They allowed us to conclude on a Business Model, showing how to efficiently make a company out of Quantifly.Drone companies:
Potential business model
