Our in-depth thinking about Applied Design shows us the real potential of Quantifly on the pollutant detection market. We investigate how this project can be develop and improve to lead to the creation of a company, if the laboratory results allowed it.
To find out the better orientation to give to Quantifly, we reached out for companies and incubators. To do so, we designed a flyer, wrote a project presentation and pitch. We took appointments with a lot of professionals for two major purposes:

Though we did not get any official sponsoring to fund the whole project at once, we had help from different companies and gathered a lot of opinions about Quantifly. Some of the meetings were really useful and made us discover potential applications that we never suspected before! We also learnt a lot about where our project needed improvement. Gathering the feedbacks of all these professionals unveiled a lot of potential for our project.
Many professionals 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.
To conclude, these professional appointments have permit the development of our iGEM project, give an entrepreneurial dimension to our projec and brought us many interesting business contacts. We draw 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 discuss 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 have 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.
These companies were very interested in using a quick and precise sensor on a drone since this sector is constantly increasing.

We managed to get in touch with the Bouygues Group and especially the construction area of this group. We got several appointments with different persons within this big company : Noëlie LOPES, Project Manager in the Bouygues innovation lab; Roland LEROUX, Director in charge of big-data and pollution mapping, Solenn DE CHAURAND in charge of indoor pollution detection, and Thierry JUIF, Director of sustainable construction and ecoconception R&D.
Bouygues group did show lots of interest in our project but this latest was not developped enough to allow a sponsoring relationship to be established. 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 have to verify if this building is clean from any form of pollution before closing the contract. In this situation, our product can be a good alternative to existing physical-chemical techniques.

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 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.