Inventors get advice on selling creations
UB research center hosts marketing class
The Ph.D.s were the students Tuesday at the University at Buffalo’s downtown campus.
Nine teams of scientists and inventors spent the day under the tutelage of consultants, intellectual property attorneys and MBA students, trying to draw a map for turning their laboratory creations into marketable products.
Called the Pre-Seed Workshop, the business boot camp is designed to help people who are experts in various scientific and technical fields learn the language of selling a product or service to the investors who are their primary hope for seed capital. After a week off to refine their presentations, they will return next Tuesday for a trial run at pitching their ideas to a panel of real investors.
Marnie LaVigne is director of business development for the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, the UB research center that is hosting the workshop.
She explained that the cutting-edge technologies and biological products being cooked up in the labs of UB, Roswell Park Cancer Center, Niagara University and elsewhere are often too expensive, too risky and too long-range to be financed by a typical small business loan. To attract the kind of venture capital investment they will need to turn a laboratory breakthrough into a marketing breakout, inventors have to learn a whole new vocabulary of marketing.
“For many of them, this is their first crack at trying to create, not even a business plan, but at least a presentation,” LaVigne said. “We call it thickening their ideas.”
The inventors will also have to get used to the idea of their creation as a commodity, the ownership of which they must share with investors in order to raise start-up capital.
“The inventors tend to think of their idea as ‘all mine,’ ” LaVigne said. “Well, it really is all yours, if you can pay for it.”
The core of each team is the person who already has an idea, a process, a device or a chemical compound that, in theory, could become a marketable product. Each of them is dubbed the idea champion for their team, and often brings along a fellow expert, called the technical champion, to help explain it.
Workshop organizers then match those champions with someone from UB’s or Roswell Park’s technology transfer office, an attorney, a business graduate student and a couple of experienced consultants, one called a value add expert and one simply called the coach.
Eric Cornavaca, a consultant with 19 years of experience in the life science industry, was one such coach. One of his sessions with his team members was devoted to focusing their minds on what the market for their brainstorm might be. And, if they have more than one application in mind, which one is closest to being brought to market, to make a profit so the company can pursue more inventions and more opportunities.
“Which of these products is closer to prime time?” Cornavaca asked, marker poised to record the answers on the white board.
Cornavaca is also CEO of Oral Health Innovations, a maker of special toothbrushes for people with limited dexterity. Oral Health’s creators were among the students in the Pre-Seed Workshop held in Buffalo last spring.
Other questions before the teams Tuesday included identifying their target market, the size of the demand and the competitive slings and arrows they will face along the way. People marketing medical products have different concerns than those in other industries. The federal government can be an obstacle, setting high licensing standards, or a friend, providing grants for treatments of diseases that few people suffer from. And, rather than selling directly to the patients who who might benefit from their creations, life science entrepreneurs have to market to the doctors and insurance companies that actually make most purchasing decisions.
The Pre-Seed Workshops began in Rochester five years ago, according to organizer and business consultant Judy Albers. In addition to previous visits to Buffalo, organizers have also held workshops in Ithaca, Syracuse, Albany, New York City and Long Island. “We’ve become part of the fabric of the New York State entrepreneurial community,” Albers said.
