Case Study Starting and Building a Business on FP7 Research | Front Office Box
Starting a business is easy – people do it every day. Building a business from a baseline of nothing is slightly more complex. But that’s what we’re going to do and we’ll be telling the story – our living case study – as we go along. It might be fun, It’ll certainly be challenging, and probably a little embarrassing in places – like being caught unawares on the WC.
Over the past couple of years we’ve acquired some front line experience in FP7 research projects – as Exploitation Managers. That’s how the European Commission describes the commercial people. Exploitation Managers are the ones responsible for turning the ECs investment in grant into something which actually benefits people. That means a starting and building a business – some entity selling the results of the research to others who want to buy it.
Exploitation Management can seem a poison chalice – working with academics and scientists on one hand and with EC bureaucrats on the other. They all have egos the size of mountains and insist the world has to go around their way. Unfortunately one wants to go clockwise while the other holds the cards and is going the other way.
But that’s just the start of the problem. The really difficult bit comes with funding. EC rules allow the grant to cover the costs of exploitation planning and reporting, but not actually doing the messy job of turning what the scientists come up with into products others will invest in.
On the other hand FP7 offers a real opportunity. It pays the costs of the best and brightest so they can produce genuine innovation at a fraction of the cost private sector businesses would incur.
In our case the opportunity is a new technology for diagnosing Parkinsons Disease. We get to own a piece of the IPR developed by 3 SMEs and 4 universities. That is we get to own a piece provided the research results in something healthcare providers and their supply chains want to buy.
There are just a couple of minor problems we need to find ways around.
The research will take at least 3 years.
- We have to put in 9 months of effort (at least) with no funding
- Barriers to entry for the medical device business are the size of Everest
- Working with academics is akin to herding cats
- Flexibility isn’t a word in the EC lexicon-they don’t do that
That’s the downside. The upside is enormous. Neurological diseases are far worse for quality of life and cost of healthcare than anything else. Aging populations mean the problem is only going to get bigger. Within 5 years degenerative diseases will be the world’s biggest problem, and there are no obvious solutions.
So here’s the bottom line
- Massively profitable and growing market
- Zero competition
- No interest from risk averse investment community
- Hard to reach buyers
- No cash
What would you do with this opportunity? How would you set about starting and building a business to make the most of this opportunity?
We’re getting set with the planning – different packaging, channels and partners – and will share our ideas in this living case study as we go along. Watch this space.
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June 14th, 2010 - Posted in Starting a business | Add a Comment Starting a business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. -->
