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:

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.
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.

Companies involved: Le FlyLab, Civic Drone, BlackFoot

The aim of these interviews was to see the technical aspect of our drone, and to compare it to other existing models. While it seems that the model we have currently is fitting the use we want to make of it, we’ve been extensively warned about legislations concerning the use of a drone within a public area: in France at least, the drone has to be registered, and a license issued to the pilot, before anything can be done. We also got a lot of advices concerning a possible guiding system that would allow measurement automation through a GPS-oriented drone. However, these companies were very interested in using a light, quick and precise sensor on a drone, since the sector is constantly increasing.

We managed to get in touch with the Bouygues Group, a big group working in many domains, especially in construction, and we got several appointments with various persons, such as a Project Manager in the Bouygues innovation lab, a director in charge of big-data and pollution mapping, the person in charge of indoor pollution detection, and the Director of sustainable construction and ecoconception R&D. We hoped for Bouygues to sponsor us, but were eventually disappointed, as our project wasn’t complete enough for their taste. However, they gave us a lot of ideas about where to use our project, for example in construction places: when a buiding is finished, the company in charge of its construction must first check if the building is clean of any form of pollution before closing the contract. Our product could be very useful in such a situation, as we would be saving the company a lot of time and money.

As said before, we met a jurist at the National Institute of Intellectual Property. Though the iGEM is based on open source science, there was not much we could do to patent our idea before the end of the competition. However, we got two leads: First, we sent what is called a “Soleau envelope”, a letter containing a short description of our project and the team members specifying that we started working on the idea at a given date. In the case of a potential concurrent using our work, we would be able to claim that we were the first working on the idea.
Then, he told us about “Improvement patents”: though our complete DNA sequence will be online in the registry, and our drone’s files available on our Wiki, if we work on the project so hard that we eventually improve it enough, it can be considered as a different product and get patented as a new innovation.

We concluded our meetings and interviews with a discussion on what business approach we could take , and ended up developing our own business model. 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. This also solves the problem caused by the drone licence, as the technician, would be trained to pilot drones, and would have authorization from the client.

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.

Lastly, we worked on a budget estimation, that we used to set the price of a flight, according to the Business Model above (we sell a service, being a set of datas collected after 1 flight).
We stated that, after three years spent on R&D, our drone would be able to perform 15 measurements, and that we are a startup of 4 persons, paid 28k€ a year. We then realized the following tables:

First, we have the approximate cost of a single flight, based on the time it takes to get the results, and the required material:

Then, we calculated the total investment required to properly launch our project after three years of Research and Development:

We then evaluated how much we would earn by year, taking into account the growth of our company and the increasing number of sales. We also stated that we would hire an extra technician in 2025.

Lastly, we compared these numbers with our investment cost to see after how long we would cover our initial costs: if everything goes as planned, the company will start being lucrative in 2029.