Business plan completions like Biotechnology YES! are based on fictitious (though feasible) business ideas.  At Newcastle University(and others; this is a national UK competition) post graduates, PhD students and postdocs make up teams to take part; they are given seminars by practising venture capitalists, business plan specialists, IP lawyers. They can access mentors and are generally coached when they request it, to promote the final product; the business plan.  This plan is then presented at the regional competitions and, if they make it through the first level, the teams get further coaching, attend semi-finals and finals.

If all this effort is put into a business plan for an idea which is fictitious, what exactly is the point?

I have been told that people who progress in the competition, and include this fact on a CV, always get traction from it, that employers value the competition.

Besides the above, I could not see the value myself when I started in my job seven months ago.  But now I do and quite emphatically.  I may see the value in a way that parallels what potential employers do.

Young researchers and scientists are not unique in the fact that they generally do not have experience in business. They are among many groups of people in the general population who do not.  So they should get the training. Of course. But what if they do but the training does not stick?

I remember an early conversation with a young researcher who has been trying to start a company which commercialises his university research.  He said that he wishes that he had more instruction in the “nitty gritty of accounting” because accountants seem out to mystify him and ran rings around him. I had heard these sorts of comments before and it seemed like a fair comment.  If you want people to commercialise stuff then you must give them the tools to do so.  What I discovered after that is that most FMS courses contain some basic accounting teaching. Add to that the fact that each one of them would have had a high level of mathematics to even be admitted to one of their courses and I get the sense that something else is missing.

Embodiment theory indicates that things that we read activates the parts of the brain that relates to how we have experienced those things before. And if I have not experienced them before?  What happens when I meet concepts that are more and more theoretical? For example: I ride a bicycle and I have a full body memory of it; I have never ridden a unicycle but I have seen it up close and watched a real person ride one; I have only seen pictures of penny-farthings. But what are 29ers or boda-boda?  These jargon references to types of bicycles have no resonance with memory in my brain and I would barely remember these words if I walked away from my article now.

This is the problem with bicycle jargon – and business jargon. Exit strategy. Nett profit. Cash flow. Sustainability. The jargon has to be embodied.  The words need to link to concepts and must have been experienced in some way before the words and concepts that they refer to are useable.  A student who has been taught business principles and has no embodied reference to the context for the jargon may as well not have been taught.

A business plan competition is a hothouse, an intense time where jargon is explained, used and then required, for the final presentations.  A business plan competition is a business conversion course for researchers.

 

* There are other jargon busters that work well.  Best is to go forth and run your own business. A good teacher who utilises case studies, movies and role play breaks through this icy layer as well.

* 29ers are mountain bikes that are built to use 700c or ISO 622 mm wheels. (according to wiki)

* Boda-boda, also known as a Poda-Poda in some parts of Africa, is a bicycle taxi.