Team:Macquarie Australia/Interviews





As a part of our work in human practices, we performed a collection of 23 interviews with professionals from both academia and industries across the globe in order to refine our project idea. Through the course of these interviews, we were able to create a large network of connections and potential links, shown as in the figure below.






These interviews were central to the execution and creation of our customer discovery framework, since they provided us with feedback we could use to refine our final product. While the connections formed by the interviewing process are highly important, we also set out to test a series of hypotheses formulated around current technologies and issues in the market via our interviews. During the analysis of these interviews, we grouped our hypotheses into 3 categories to identify critical hypotheses and enable us to interpret the results of our experiments.

  • Critical Hypotheses- Encompass the most crucial aspects of your project. Without these, your project will not proceed.
  • Non-critical Hypotheses- These aid the outcome of your project but are not crucial for the success of your project.
  • Superfluous Hypotheses- Have no effect on project success but may play a minor role in future applications.

After hypotheses analysis, we could draw out crucial information from interviews about our project and integrate this information into our project. Some of the most common topics and concerns that came up during these interviews included:

  1. The need to figure out a method to purify and isolate vesicles;
  2. The fact that our vesicles might be leaky since they are lipid based and non-rigid;
  3. The possibility that concentrating proteins within the vesicles would lead to inclusion body formation;
  4. The potential for the isolation of metabolic pathways and application towards metabolic engineering and;
  5. The fact that the vesicles that are produced are of inconsistent size.

Team Macquarie would like to thank the following academics, industry professionals and teaching staff for giving us their time and valuable knowledge in our interviews.

  1. Dr. Andrew Care
  2. Dr. Briardo Llorente
  3. Mr. Anthony Gurlica
  4. Dr. Alf Garcia-Bennett
  5. A/Prof. Sierin Lim
  6. Dr. Hugh Goold
  7. Dr. Tom Williams
  8. Dr. Jenny Vo
  9. Dr. Brendan Orner
  10. Prof. Nico Bruns
  11. Prof. Jan van Hest
  12. Dr. Lisa Goldsmith
  13. Ms. Lynne Teo
  14. Dr. Suzanne Mithieux
  15. Ms. Monica Espinosa Gomez
  16. Dr. Malvin Eutick
  17. Ms. Shabarni Gupta
  18. Dr Imesh De Silva
  19. Dr Eleanore Liong
  20. Ms. Danae Sharp
  21. Dr. Robyn Lindner
  22. Dr. Lucinda McRobb
  23. Dr. Joanne Tan