What We've Done

Our OLS Synbio team has created a project which is desirable by people, viable as a business, and feasible with technology. These are the three main pillars, we built our project on.

We have participated in many entrepreneurial workshops and conferences, such as the Berkeley Program to learn about design thinking. After months of research in many areas of study, we were able to narrow down our project to plastics. From there, we decided to focus on the recycling process of the plastic problem because of our outreach. With the knowledge from the Berkeley program, we knew that our idea had to be desirable by people, viable as a business, and feasible with technology.

We pitched our project to representatives from ATB Financial and received important feedback on what to incorporate when presenting a business plan, and how to properly persuade the audience of the viability of our design. We met with and pitched to the Bow Valley Credit Union and other local business and received numerous donations.

We presented our project to aGem, an iGem prep-competition, within the province of Alberta in Canada and at a high school jamboree where we won 4000 dollar grants in total from these events.

Our team attended an entrepreneurship conference and workshop where we learned about how to turn a product into a business and how to give an effective value proposition.

We also spoke to people who started and own their own small businesses, including Lisa Oberding and David Lloyd from Fredsense and Justin Pahara and Julie Legault from Amino Labs.

In addition to all this, our team wrote a paper for a peer-reviewed BioTreks journal, you can find the link for it here.

Members of our team at the Berkeley Program in California.