Yes, BIOEMTECH started as a team who met in university, made its first steps there, but at some point, decided to sail on its own journey. We found it impossible to try and combine academia with entrepreneurship. Many people speak and write about merging these two worlds… but it is mainly people in academia or government, not entrepreneurs. If I had to select one word to describe what brought BIOEMTECH where we are today, I would choose the word “dedication”. Many times, I am asked why I left a permanent position and did not combine BIOEMTECH with my academic duties. And it was not only me; there was a team that left academia and decided to dedicate ourselves to this venture.
My first thought was: Do you know any business where the ones who have the inspiration, vision, ideas, methodology, faith, willingness to learn etc etc… run the business whenever they have free time? Do you know many shops, even a kiosk, that succeed when they are their owners’ hobby, and you don’t show real dedication?
My second thought was that there are many academic entrepreneurs, who approach investors and show them nice business plans, in which their company, with a “small” initial financing, will soon make many, many millions. However, they are not willing to risk their academic salary and dedicate themselves to this “huge opportunity”. In other words, they want someone to take the risk, while they remain on the safe side.
My -and the team’s- experience is simple and measurable. When I left university and dedicated all my time to BIOEMTECH, all our numbers grew exponentially, and they keep growing for the past 4 year. Till then, our numbers were stable. The focus was on how we could get the next grant, hire a promising student, find a scholarship, get a few more square meters inside a collaborating research center etc.
We had so many other things to do; teaching, diploma theses, writing papers, admin work, exams, conferences, project meetings, plus huge bureaucracy for most. Time was allocated to all those things and maybe we had a 10%-20% of our time to devote to the company. We wanted to grow, but at the same time, minimize risk, without understanding that in this way we were losing opportunities, creating the self-fulfilling prophecy that some things cannot be possible.
But when we decided to dedicate ourselves to BIOEMTECH, everything changed. Our future was dependent only on the company’s growth; No governmental money. 100% of our time and mindset was on the business. New ideas emerged, new opportunities entered in our radar and started looking doable. We realized that we needed to invest in people who would bring new things and not train students to do the things we knew. We understood that a bigger space was needed, even if not in a research campus. It became obvious that external collaborators do not take our money, but they are an investment for getting knowledge that we did not have.
There was no reason to re-invent the wheel or learn through repeating mistakes that so many people had done in the past. There was no one to blame apart from us if something did not work. And there was no excuse for not trying something different. And small wins became more and more frequent. And then those wins were bigger. And the self-fulfilling prophecy changed and we now believe that anything can become possible!