Biotechnology Enterprise Development

Catalog description

In this course students learn how to develop a biotech start-up, create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), business model and strategy for the product. Students will learn about business modeling, customer development, customer validation, proposal, product branding, and marketing for their product. The course will require students to spend most time to validate their start up concept and prototypes with potential customers and adapt to critical feedback and revise their respective value propositions accordingly. Students learn to balance technical product development with customer requirements, business strategy and budget constraints. This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what it is like to start a company. Different business modeling will be covered. By understand customer discovery and validation concepts will aid students to effectively modify their original concepts to meet market demands. Student teams will learn how to revise, improve their prototype by the end of the term. This is a fast paced course in which students are expected to spend most of the time outside of the classroom to interact with potential customers to validate, test, verify, and integrate essentials elements for their start-up business proposal. Up to now, students have been learning some technologies and methods for solving problems in the life science industry and build a prototype for their start-up. However, a new venture proposal is not a collection of isolated bits. It should be thorough validated via customer's inputs and market needs to tell a single story of how the venture will reach its end goals. Final deliverable is creation and presentation of a well explicated, business proposal in addition to a product prototype corresponding to the business proposal. Prerequisites: 02-651 and 11-695