Team:William and Mary/Human Practices/Business Students
Business Students
To expose future business leaders to the strategic business opportunities provided by synthetic biology we hosted a speaker from a synthetic biology company and invited business students to attend.
Find Communities
At the Mid Atlantic Meet-Up hosted by UMaryland we met CEO and founder of Spira, Elliot Roth. We were excited by how his company had taken bioengineering and turned it into a successful business. We wanted to help future business leaders envision synthetic biology as an investment and an asset, so we invited either Mr. Roth or another member of Spira, the CTO and lead engineer Surjan Singh, to speak on our campus to some of our Business students. We connected with our entrepreneurship center to reach out to business students who had already expressed an interest in starting their own company after graduation.
Evaluating Interest & Understanding
We met with three business students to discuss what they would like to see in the presentation and what would be most valuable. They all shared that their interest would be more in the potential markets, the timeline for synthetic biology developments, and some of the unexpected challenges that develop when doing this kind of work. The goal of this project was to highlight how entrepreneurship and synthetic biology can come together to create successful businesses, while answering business students logistical questions.
Consider How to Connect
In addition to talking to business students, we also connected with Graham Henshaw the Executive Director of the Entrepreneurship center and Clinical Professor at the William & Mary Mason School of Business. Graham shared about the speaker series that was held in the Entrepreneurship center. The new program brought in speakers to talk specifically to students who have an interest in entrepreneurship. The presentation and Q&A style was well received by the business students. With this in mind we moved forward with our formal presentation style and followed up with Surjan Singh. His presentation would put synthetic biology into a business context, engaging more university students and future business owners in synthetic biology. This early engagement would hopefully lead to larger investments in synthetic biology research from members of the business community.
Implementation
On September 26th Mr. Singh came to present to 21 business and biology students about his journey with Spira, the pitfalls and creative problem solving that went into making the company successful.
Reflect & Record
At the end of the presentation we asked students to leave suggestions for the program, many students responded that they would have liked to hear even more about the science behind Spira and bioengineering. This was a wonderful surprise which demonstrates that there is a deeper interest in our work beyond just business applications.