Entrepreneurship 101 for Early Career Scientists By Alaina G. Levine

So you’re thinking of launching a business? Congratulations! You are in for far more work that you expected and more challenges that you could have imagined. But the payoff is fantastic: you get to take the knowledge you have discovered or generated in your research group or lab and develop it into a product that can improve our world. In other words, you can solve real-world problems and possibly even make money doing it.

Entrepreneurship is a very exciting and realistic career possibility for scientists. In fact, you already have many of the basic attributes required to be successful in this path. As Rhonda Abrams wrote in her book,

“Passion to Profits: Business Success for New Entrepreneurs,” entrepreneurs are:

l Driven to victory – nothing will stop you;

l Self-starters, go-getters, who think beyond realm of possibilities;

l See opportunities where others see problems;

l Control your own destiny, and are responsible for your own work;

l Willing to give up “safety net” and benefits of a regular paycheck/job;

l Change agents and flexible.

These characteristics describe you, don’t they? After all, you couldn’t and wouldn’t be successful in science and engineering if you did not possess these skills and constantly looked for ways to hone them. In fact, these attributes are the natural result from pursuing a career in a scientific or engineering discipline, especially beyond the graduate level.

Furthermore, you already work in a business environment. Yes, it’s true! In fact, every entity is a business: your university, department and even more granulistically, your research group or lab is, at its heart, a business. You have customers (students and funders), you have a product (the degree, and the educational services that goes with it, as well as the research you generate), and you have all the other trappings of a business ecosystem, including most importantly sales and marketing experience (writing papers, presenting at conferences, authoring grant proposals). Your passion for furthering science makes you a terrific candidate for launching your own biz outside the walls of academia.

So since you have the requisite skill set and you have the talent, what else do you need to know to launch an entrepreneurial venture, especially one that is based on a technological innovation?

£ Forget about science for the beauty of it: in a business, and more specifically a tech entrepreneurial endeavor, science and engineering serves as a foundation of an innovation that brings a solution to a problem that people will pay for. It has to somehow be able to be commercialized into a product or service that customers will buy. It is up to you and your team to determine how your scientific discovery can be developed into a product. Once you do that, you are already ahead of most scientists.

£ The customer is king: your product or service must be able to be sold and delivered to the consumer. They must be able to use it; they must be able to solve a problem they have with it. As exciting as your scientific discovery is, if you want to develop a business around it, it has to lead to a customer making an actual monetary transaction for your innovation.

£ Understanding your market is critical: you will do an exorbitant amount of research before you launch your venture, and one area that is especially important about which you need to be extremely knowledge is your market. What is the ecosystem in which the problem you endeavor to solve exists? Why has the societal or market need been missed up to this point? How do customers buy products

in this ecosystem? How will you promote it and market it to ensure people make a purchase? Along these same lines, you will need to know who exactly will buy your product, as the customer and end-user as sometimes very different. (Case in point: in the pharmaceutical industry, the customer is often the insurance companies who buy the drugs from Big Pharma, but the end user is the individual person who takes the medicine.)

£ Investors finance people not products: this is an old saying, but a worthwhile one to reference. Anyone can come up with an idea. Dr. X may have an idea right now for a flying car using robotic technology. But if he can’t find a way to convert the technology to a product, if he lacks the vision and leadership ability to craft a plan to commercialize the idea and get it to a paying market, then all it remains is an idea. A true entrepreneurial leader has the idea and the leadership capability to build a team that can bring that idea to fruition. They know how to rally support, find and summon talent, craft strategic, realistic plans and execute those plans with laser-sharp attention to detail and solving the overarching problem to deliver value to their customers.

Take note that investors look at the track records of entrepreneurs, and they often invest in people who have run multiple companies. Even if their prior enterprises did not succeed, the leader has gained strategic insight and information which makes them a safer bet for the investor the next time around. If you make a mistake on someone else’s dime and time and can show me that you learned from it and won’t make it again, the risk associated with me investing in you and your firm is immediately mitigated.

£ Get ready to make plans: you will need an overarching Business Plan for Commercialization, which will include the following elements:

l Definition of the problem you endeavor to solve

l Your Solution: what can it do, why can it do this?

l Your competitive advantage: what are the barriers to market that make it hard or potentially impossible for others to seize this same opportunity? Why now?

l Your Intellectual Property: do you have a patent on your invention?

l The Marketing Plan: who is the customer, how will they buy it, when will they buy it, what are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) associated with the market? What is your projected market share (how much of the market do you foresee being able to seize with your product)?

l The Business Model: how will your company actually make money, how will you distribute the product, how will you continuously stay innovative and ahead of the competitive?

l The Finance Model: how will you fund your venture?

l Your Exit Strategy: how will you bring closure and returns to your investors? What is the next step after you do X (sell your product, for example)? Will you sell the company to another? Will you license the technology? What is your timeline for investors to see their return on their investment (ROI)?

The final and perhaps most important aspect of launching an entrepreneurial career is knowing that innovation plays a starring role. Companies become stagnant and crumble without constant innovation, as do research programs! And one of the challenges in tech entrepreneurship in particular is that the marketplace is always on the move – so you absolutely must situate yourself and your firm to be ready to adjust as the market dictates. You have to be flexible and nimble and quick if you want to stay more than just afloat, but rather thrive and prosper.

But you are in luck: this attribute of being innovative is again an advantage that you have as a scientist. You are naturally innovative. You are used to this type of thinking and problem-solving. You instinctively look for new problems to solve when one is complete.

The more you incorporate innovative thinking and problem-solving into your daily experience as a scientist the better you are preparing yourself for a career as an entrepreneur. This is something you CAN do – you can succeed, you can solve a problem with major societal impact, you can make a profit and you can have fun.

So what are you waiting for?

Alaina G. Levine is a science and engineering writer, career consultant and professional speaker and comedian. Her new book on networking strategies for scientists and engineers will be published by Wiley in 2014. She can be reached through her website at www.alainalevine.com or through her twitter handle @AlainaGLevine.

© 2013, Alaina G. Levine