By Carmen Bianca Socaciu – Senior Consultant at Gate2Growth.
There are a lot of ideas about exploitation and how new knowledge can be valued today. Today, a lot of research and development results can be exploited either through the commercial route or the dissemination route for the good of the society like events, conferences and the like.
While CIRCLES project is unveiling the potential of the microbiomes in the 7 food chains, you could be thinking of the potential of the knowledge the project will generate and its value. This can be exploited via the commercial route where you need to have a legal company with or without employees. Some of the Research & Development (R&D) done in CIRCLES, might also influence the policy legislation and regulation within legumes and or meat. This CAN lead to a need, for example in consultant services for the industry, to know how to deal with these new regulations and the opportunity for exploitation of the R&D will arise here.
Let’s look at it differently: Let’s say you will be participating in our E- learning courses, or be part of our workshops, follow us on the social media or simply be present at one of our events or final conference where we will be disseminating all the important discoveries from one or more of the 7 food systems like tomato, spinach, poultry, and salmon.
Figure 1. Dissemination and Communication Strategies (CIRCLES Deliverable 10.1)
Depending on the know-how that you already possess ( either from the food industry, a research department for food, simply curiosity and so on) and the new information on microbiomes available from one of the events, you are able to create a new venture. This is something that we call “indirect exploitation of research result”, as it used by someone else than the person/department or institution that has been directly involved in the research that led to its discovery or invention.
Irrespectively of the type of company you would like to create, and how you will choose to utilize the new knowledge or R&D you discovered; you have to have a good business plan!
A few things to remember when you develop a business plan:
- A business plan is a presentation of assumptions
- Organize information in a convincing way
- IF you are using external sources…. make sure you have a full link to refer to, so people can check where your data came from
- People reading your business plan, most likely don’t have any scientific background
- So, get your grandmother to read it 😊! I mean it!
- Collect customer feedback
- Challenging investors’ assumptions …IS A BIG business opportunity!
To go more in-depth, watch our video here.
Stay tuned, follow our development and who knows maybe your next venture will be based on the knowledge about microbiomes from CIRCLES!
Figure 2. How to attract investors (Bundgaard-Jorgensen, Uffe. How to Attract Investors: A Subjective Guide to the Mindset of Investors and Their Requirements. Pan Stanford, 2016. Available at: http://gate2growth.com/home)
