Biotechnology YES 2008

A day after I turned 3 ONE!, the 3 days Biotechnology YES competition is finally here. My team was among the 5 teams to represent Newcastle University to compete in this prestigious annual event in the regional heat. This is the first time that the regional heat is held in Newcastle. Sad that I don't get a free trip to explore another city in the UK but I realized that it was a privilege to have the competition so near to my darlings. I was home sick on the first day.

The Biotechnology YES (Young Entrepreneurs Scheme) is an innovative competition developed to raise awareness of the commercialisation of bioscience ideas among postgraduate students/postdoctoral scientists. In this competition, we are supposed to come up with a pseudo-company based on a novel idea which need not necessary be real and come up with a business plan to lure investments.

I drove to St James's Park around 8.45am, register myself and proceed to the Macpie Suite

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Perhaps St. James is not a Catholic Church. From the Macpie suite, is a magnificent view.

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The day one morning was filled with crash courses and workshops by experts regarding the Intellectual property protection, investors, finance etc which we biotechnologists find it quite difficult to digest especially the finance part.
After lunch, we were sent to our respective executive box to develop our masterpiece, the business plan.

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Before any stress kicked in, we were sane enough to get our group photo taken.

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From Left, me (Finance Director), Khai (Operation & Marketing Director), Mike (Managing Director) although he prefers to be referred as the CEO and Bekir (Scientific Director). We have agreed earlier on on our roles in the company which the name was yet conceived.
Then, I was side tracked to take more photographs of this place because it will cost a fortune to get in here on my own.

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Developing a business plan was not that straight forward. See Bekir not listening to the MD while I quietly set my camera to capture this moment.

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After a long discussion, our company was borned.

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Genosphere Limited. We have developed a revolutionary chemistry which allows the detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria in clinical samples within an hour compared to the current 48 hours. Furthermore, the antibiotic susceptibility tests profile will also be generated simultaneously which allows the clinician to prescribe the correct/effective antibiotics to the respective patient. Sounds cool isn't it. Reducing operational time from 48h to 1h!
we worked very hard till night.

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We owe Nestle a big thanks for sponsoring us with almost free flow of KitKat Chunky Mini, Breakaway and Blue Ribbon. Gosh! I've never taken so much KitKat in one day! It's like I can still taste it when I close my mouth.

Everything was worth it. we were taken down to the football ground just before dinner.

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This is the NU Manager's seat. It's heated so that the manager doesn't jumped up during the winter match.

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Hmmmm see who is the new NU manager.

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Not that only, we have the privilege to tour the changing room too.

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And the bathroom,

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and the NU strategy room.

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and this one...massage room? with a huge tank behind me which I guess must be to stew the fellow footballers.

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Dinner starts at 8pm or later. I was hungry for real food rather than KitKat and to make things worse, there were only one lift to the dinner hall in the Gallowgate suite. Here is a long traffic jam.

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Most participants brought along their Luggages because the hotel that we are going to stay is quite a distance away (10-15 mins walk I guess). So, their luggages took up more space in the lift. Mike, our MD from Newcastle itself brought the largest suitcase among all. It was big enough to bring clothing for a month stay in the Jury's Inn.
Hmmm. they serve us Newcastle United Merlot before the 4 course dinner (they count a cup of fresh filtered coffee is part of the dinner with United Mints)

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Half way through the dinner was the elevator pitch whereby each group was given 60 seconds to sell their company idea. The logic is, if you can't get a person to buy your brilliant idea within 60 seconds, you failed. This pitching stuff really dragged on for quite some time. I helped to fetch my teammates to Jury's Inn where we checked in together and Home I go. I drove home to my darlings,just in time to feed my son a bottle of nen nen before putting him to sleep.

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I went back to the Jury's Inn the following morning just in time to take my second breakfast with Bekir.

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If you ask me how good is Jury's Inn, a 3-star hotel. Hmmm, you can hear people in the toilet next door, but they do provide HI-SPEED BROADBAND which they proudly advertise it everywhere. It sounds so good until you see the fine print somewhere at the lower end at the back of the flyer.
10 mins - 1 pound
1 hour - 10 pounds
24 hours - 20 pounds (if I remember correctly)

Day 2 was more stressful than Day 1. We had 3 case studies whereby 3 speakers who have successfully set-up their company came to gave a talk. Everybody was talking about the Intellectual property and science and the story but none of the talk was helpful to our business plan.
Again, we were sent to our Executive box to finish off with our business plan. Things get quite heated up today. quarrel now and then and normally a mentor will just walked in when things get heated up which give some time for things to cool down again. Mentors are experts in their own field who offers consultancy to us. These are a bunch of helpful people. Lawyers, CEOs, Accountants, etc. However, I believe we have spent too much time talking about the patent stuff. Of all the 6-7 mentors that we have for the 2 days, only one mentor came to help us to get our finance right. Thanks to Andrew E. for your help. I guess finance is the weakest point in every group as participants are all made up from Bio-people. That's what the title of the competition suggests anyway.

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whenever we are too stressed up, there will always be a place for us to cool down.

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Just go outside the room into the stadium. It was cold...with some strong wind from some unknown storm kicking in. See the yellow light in the field, it is to facilitate photosynthesis because not all part of the field get equal amount of sunlight everyday.

Dinner was serve at the same place and we went back straight away. I suggested to our MD to look for a function room to work on our business plan (which I think the hotel will not do that for free)rather than doing it in the bedroom but I was wrong. They happily opened a function room at the 1st floor for our use. If you never ask, you will never know.

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This is the function room that we worked till 2am on Day-3. Bekir treated us with a pint of Carling. I took a good hot shower before bed. somehow I snored that night and woke Bekir up. Poor guy. I forgot to warn him that I snored but anyway, anyone will sleep with loud sound when tired.

Day-3

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The sun is up, the day that we all have been waiting for. The catch, winner will go down to London for the finale and national champion go to US for the business plan competition. Oh yeah, with everything paid for.
The competition commenced with 4 parallel streams where each team was to deliver a 20 minutes business plan and another 20 minutes of Q&A.
When this was over, we had lunch at the hotel then proceed to Barista Bar for a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. Again, the organizers served us wine again before announcing the results.
My team didn't make it to the final but we are proud that 1 team from Newcastle will be in London to make us all proud.

What (I think) went wrong in our business plan.
1. Poor preparation. If we knew the actual requirements, we could have prepared the slides much earlier. Thinking that the 2 days worth of crash courses and workshops helps, it didn't add to what we already know. Anyway, other teams used the similar amount of time to prepare, so this might not be a good reason.
2. Not enough practice. We practiced our presentation once only. At 2am just before sleep. Worse of all, we prepared our own slides and compile it to a master powerpoint file, so it was so obvious that the presentation was created by 4 different people.
3. Unclear product and the science. At the end of the presentation,the judges missed our product.They have no idea what we are selling. Gone case .In cases like this, we were at fault. I thought the idea was clear! we all thought the idea was clear but we are all scientist, the judges were not. Worse, we have an accountant as our judge. The science was too long winded for them to understand.
4. Listen too much. We were warned that mentors tend to give contradicting advices. It is true and mentors were not the judges. Some of our master business strategies were shot down by the judges even though it was a brilliant strategies advised by our mentors. Listen at your own risk. However, one of the rounding up comment by one of the judge was all these will never go wrong in the real life situation because we would have real accountants to do our finance and lawyers for our patents and legal stuffs. What could possibly go wrong.
5. The finance part was average but the accountant wants to see more numbers which we have but not in the slides. Hmmm.
6. Get team mates who will die if they don't participate in the competition. We lost 1 teammate as he went for a conference in Geneva (I don't blame him because the competition date was shifted and clashed with his conference date which was set a long time ago) and we replaced him with another whose supervisor prohibits him from joining a week before the competition. Supervisor's boy. Awww.
7. Bothered too much for real figures. I think we wasted too much time to put in real numbers in our pseudo-business plan. We did our best to do the real market research to get the numbers right but seems like it was not entirely significant to the judges.

If I am given a chance to compete again in Biotech YES, I would
1. complete the presentation slides at least a month before the competition
2. read more about finance and costing. perhaps get some help from some nice accountant lecturers or students in Newcastle University.
3. create a visual product
4. a product that is not novel is OK. even better as I can get hold of proven business strategies. Just have to find from somewhere. It's just a competition.

What I've learned from this competition is just too valuable to be put into words. At least I now know the process of bringing science into the market now and I've make some really good friends especially from my team, Genosphere. Perhaps Genosphere LtD will one day materialized, perhaps not. And we all know that there are 2 types of science, blue sky science which is purely academic and another that can be commercialized.

If you are reading this and you are a post grad student or a post doc in the Biological Field in one of the UK's Universities, I encourage you to participate in the Biotechnology YES 2009 or later.
I do hope that there will be more bloggers in the future Biotechnology YES competition as I was searching blogs for this topic but never found one.

All the best for the Newcastle Team to London in December.