BioBusiness and Beyond…. Roger Vaughan talking to Ian Shott CBE

paraphrased by me during the question and answer phase

Ian Shott CBE went from working at the international level for big chemical companies to taking over a spinout which he built up and sold.  He took companies tiptoeing on the edge of disaster and worked with them to strengthen governance, identify what is going well and do more of it.  These companies were returned to profitability and better, this was done without jobs being lost.  He currently advises the government and works on the board of the TSB and is a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.  He is also involved with a double handful of companies in the fields of industrial biotech, pharmaceuticals/medtech, chemicals/materials, companies who came to him to assist them, to accelerate them into strong growth.  There is a one year old start-up, there are companies in the 10 year old sweet spot and there are companies in the more mature phase of their lives and they are in the.

When a company is on the brink of collapse nobody argues about whether change is needed.  Everyone is on board for change.

Of the 450 venture capitalists out there in the UK only 50 really venture anything.

We are moving toward a more balanced economy in the UK with more making and manufacturing going on, and government recognition or encouragement of this.

Entrepreneurs need to express character

Judgement – which is developed through using it.

Thoughtfulness –think about what you do and insert processes that support this

Be structured – governance is essential

START-UPS

Knowhow – to be successful one should have a handle on every part of the business.  Use your practical skills.

Understand the supply chain.

Plan the path to market.

When path to market is understood you can develop a business plan, as the latter is useless without the former.

Get to know people working in the field that you are interested in because it is who you know but also who knows you.

Make a list of problems as they come up and regularly choose which ones to solve.  Three is good but no more than 10.

ON-GOING

10 years after start-up is when technological businesses hit a sweet spot and can start to make real money.  It can also be a danger time when everyone is so tired that the enterprise collapses or is sold off.  If one can accelerate through, this is when the rewards for the hard work will be realised.

Dashboard:  On a one page dashboard one has an indicator for cash flow, profitability, and assessment of risk of new products or any new initiative. All the indicators – the life signs – of the business. Review this often.

Big meeting every three months that generate 3 things that must be done. Just three things.  Do them.

Make simple the complex.

Have a business description and identify the action areas.  What comes into the yellow box? This is what gets attention.

Refresh the business plan every year.  Along with the dashboard and the action areas.

There must be rigour.  Know where all the money goes, where it comes from and what everything costs.  Money is possible to know 100%.  Governance must support this.

Know where all the money goes, where it comes from and what everything costs.  Money is possible to know.

All other variables: accept that you will know 80% don’t hold out for 99% accuracy of information because that takes too long.  However, be very alert to failure from not knowing everything so that if things go in the wrong direction, you can stop!  Stop what is being done wrong and make changes, adjustments.

 If you attended the event, or if you want to attend future events of this nature… fill in my survey here, please. Right HERE.

Mavericks, A Different Ordinary

Does a maverick wear a funny hat and clashing colours and walk through the turbulent waters upstream because he is trying to be different?  Does she try and fix a problem in a new way because she woke up that morning thinking oh goody I am going to wear my maverick heels today?

On the whole, probably not.

Mavericks just do things in their own ordinary ways, feeling ordinary; sometime that is not the same ordinary ways that were used before.  A different ordinary.  And if this is true, if mavericks don’t feel like mavericks, then people who do not consider themselves mavericks – could be.  You could be a maverick.

When I have watched young children playing each one of them will do, at minimum, one thing a day that is completely unexpected, out of the (sand) box, brilliant and maybe hilarious.  Even though I don’t always dare laugh.  If every child has maverick moments then every adult must have maverick moment.  The only difference with adults is that there is nobody watching, to say – what you did there was quite different, quite unexpected.  Everybody has maverick born into them.  This is curiosity, this is trial and error, and this is finding a way to get it right.  Whatever it is.

The question is not where we find the mavericks it is…

Where do I put myself to encourage my own inner maverick?

At hacker days at Facebook “The only real rule,” Zuckerberg has said, “is that you’re not allowed to work on the same thing that your day job is.” Hacker days are when staff come together to work on ANY idea they have had; and one is trying to produce a working product (maybe a minimum viable product) that shows whether the idea in practise is still a good idea, and then allow other people to participate in the new product.  What Zuckerberg does not say is that the other rule that precedes the only real rule is that you need to turn up for the hacker event.

You could set aside time to work on anything that is not part of your day job. And you could do it regularly.

This does not mean that you do not use your day job skills, of course, just that you are not researching your usual project, writing your usual reports. If you have a little bulletin board of ideas that you would have loved to dip into then this is when you spend half a day putting together a prototype or a collage.

 

 A Day at the Science Festival

Part 2

I watched a man make instant ice cream with milk and syrup and liquid nitrogen.  And when the clouds of Nitrogen dissipated (who would have thought that I could write that sentence outside of a novel about visiting Triton) it was ice cream and creamy and sweet.  The crystals were a little uneven but I imagine that this could be solved through more effective, high shear, agitation.

I loved the display of ancient books in a bright airy room off the gallery of the new library building and the mechanical devices and pictures of medieval pharmacopeia and botanical drawings all beautifully and informatively curated.

I could not for the life of me engage with that time honoured but completely boring thing which is the PhD student’s poster display… I walked past several with their attendant authors and graphs.  It feels like walking past a Big Issue seller.  In one of the courtyards Aberdeen University has a round enclosed pavilion.  Made of wood with a stage in the middle, space for chairs, booths and red velvety and high up stained glass windows all around.  Glorious Victorian structure.  They were offering some razzmatazz but I had to forgo the scientific can-can because I had booked myself onto…

I liked that they had fresh Jugs with water and cups for speakers, rather than bottles of mineral water.

 Lab bench to market….

Eleanor Mitchell, Commercialisation Director at Scottish Enterprise introduced their organisation and allowed two of their currently on-going successes to present their businesses.  Both had received proof of concept funding from Scottish enterprise for two years.

This is to help entrepreneurial academics commercialize their ideas.

I asked Eleanor… How do you find these academics, make them come forward, identify these ideas? Is there a large uptake?  She says that they do road shows, taking success stories such as the two who presented for us to present their work at universities.

The want to turn ideas into companies.  Look for a strong market opportunity and a real ambition to create a company……..

Proof of concept programme, Enterprise fellowships, Entrepreneurial support.  Technology entrepreneur helps.  Universities want their research to have Impact

 Harald Hass of PureVLC is working on turn Wi-Fi into Light-Fi.

Light frequency range is a lot bigger than radio range – they are using LED lights to up and download.

Insignia… Putting signalling dyes into food packaging.  Dyes that change colour when packaging is breached or when gas is released from rotting food.  Proof of concept was funded for 2 years. Then they started a spinout and almost immediately merged with a small company doing work in the area that they are working in.

Why did you decide to commercialise your idea, Harald? A jury went around German universities looking for 100 ideas that will change the world. Harald’s idea was one that was chosen and that was very enthralling.  He would simply be bored if his ideas are left in an academic paper.

Someone wanted to know – Why not just license? The answer is that the value would have gone off to multinationals – the commitment is that, if you take an investment from Scottish Enterprise, you will keep the business in Scotland.

So I was thinking….

In a country that has mines, that country is always being encouraged to refine and apply the mineral.  Beneficiation.  Iron ore into steel, steel into stainless steel and into pots and railway carriages and those little screws that they ship with my flat pack furniture.

Do we beneficiate research when we take the raw thoughts and heat them and discard the bad, publish the good in a four star journal.  Do we add value to knowledge when we commercialise our inventions?

The last talk that I attended was – for me – very light on science and heavy on a commercial plug and I didn’t enjoy it.  John Crossland’s program Let’s Think is a form of reflective learning, group sharing of ideas and physical activity based thinking for children which shares many elements of Philosophy for Children (P4C), and shares many of the same benefits.  In some way we repeat the embodiment ideas through activity and allowing children to have multiple experiences with physical objects – I would call it guided play – to accelerate cognition.  Successful learning is about feelings, then thinking processes and, finally, actions.

So I was thinking….

Does imagination and reading fiction improve the ability to think symbolically?

The train ride home was a direct one and, even though it stopped for twenty minutes on a dark black invisible stretch, uneventful.

A Day at the Science Festival

part 1.

The newest vehicle on Mars is named for Curiosity, the impetus that fuels science – the new god is crawling on the face of the old god.

I set out to be curious about a festival of curiosity. The British Science Festival is still on-going, but I was in Aberdeen for the one day only.  My day started early and started with a coincidence. I caught the 06:25 train out of Newcastle and I had booked a seat.  Already seated, across the table from my seat was a fellow South African, a friend who I had not seen or met for over a year.

The first challenge that I encountered upon reaching Aberdeen was that I don’t know Aberdeen and didn’t know how to find the venues for the festival from the station. There was no big poster saying welcome, no immediate indication that I should take a number however-many-it-was bus.  And when I walked into the maritime museum because the sign said “Tourist Information” the very helpful lady did not know about the festival; she wanted to know which of the two campuses I was headed towards and I didn’t know.  We worked it out and I took the number 20 bus.

On the campus there were posters and numbers with arrows and a main office and lots of people with bright science festival t-shirts on.  Of course it was easy to find the venue for my first talk.

Embodiment.

I caught the last half hour of Arthur Glenberg http://psychology.clas.asu.edu/glenberg talking about neuroscience, embodiment and using these results to improve the teaching of reading.

 

Lick Pick Kick.  They measured brain activity of people reading words and noticed that when one reads a word the body-action-centre of the brain lights up. So read the words

Lick

Pick

Kick.

As the person reads the word Lick, what lights up is tongue licking action part of the brain.  Reading Pick lights up the moving fingers part.  Reading kick lights up the foot kicking part of the brain.  The supposition is that this embodiment is missing when children have difficulty learning to read and linking words to action can help children learn to read.

Children were given a large toy scene with furniture and animals and characters and straw and machines.  After sounding out a sentence the child identifies the characters and walks the animals through the actions and the meanings of the sentence.  Reading and comprehension improved markedly.

 

So I was thinking…..

Can we teach Accounting this way?  Any sort of teaching must be able to make use of this idea.  I have run a small business, I have worked in a shop, I have costed out massive software projects.  When I read the word accounting I get a clear picture, an association, a body memory of money in, paying for raw materials, regular bookkeeping.  I remember my business experience in many ways. I am told during my interviews of postdocs and PhD’s that they want tuition in the nitty gritty of doing business, and this starts with accounting. When they need to deal with accountants, it feels as though accountants deliberately mystify them with obfuscating jargon. While this may be true, it is also true that even Bioscience or medical sciences students receive tuition in basic accounting and more such tuition is available for them.  It’s almost as if the tuition has not stuck.

Maybe this is the same as a young child having difficulty learning to read.  If the person does not have an idea or a body memory or context or experience to base the teaching on, the words are not real and the concepts mean very little, and there is no sense to be made from the tuition. What will work?

What has worked is Role Play.  My interviews reflect that the single tool in the previous spinout teaching workshops that was appreciated more highly than the others was the role play. Is role-play then the equivalent of toys for children?  Case studies are also very effective but did not get as much of a – ahhh that made it all make sense – feeling.