SPARK Entrepreneurial Forum: Entrepreneurship in Life Sciences

Entrepreneurship is the art of taking something that really matters to you into your own hands, identify and activate the resources that you need and push your solution along as far as you can and a little beyond. Translational projects require this mindset of entrepre-neurs, both academic entrepreneurs in the context of their home institutions, as well as business entrepreneurs who can identify the business opportunity in an idea or innovati-on and are willing to take this to the marketplace. Entrepreneurship in the life sciences requires specific c ombinations o f k nowledge sets because of the complex requirements of the underlying technologies and pathophysiolo-gies of diseases, as well as the specificities of the health care systems and of the heavy re-gulations that the businesses and industries need to meet. Business is dominated by big players, so we pose the question: Where is the space for entrepreneurs in the face of huge industries? How can finding innovative business models pave the way to the market? What do success stories of becoming an entrepreneur in the life sciences look like? We have invited an expert in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, Günter Faltin, now head of Stiftung Entrepreneurship in Berlin and founder of the company „Tee-kampagne“ to tell us on his latest findings about what he calls „David against Goliath“, the rise of new entrepreneurs with a sense of responsibility who have found innovative busi-ness concepts that can challenge traditional and maybe less effective giant businesses. Also, he is advocating a way of business model design using single expert components that has important implications for projects particularly in the academic setting and beyond. How are we applying these concepts in the life sciences? The second speaker is Julia Flötotto, an IT expert who after many years in industry has decided to become an MBA and fuse her two expert areas to find a way to become a life science entrepreneur. She has recently joined a startup in the interface of the digital and diagnostic space that she will introduce to us briefly. We are particularly happy to have her tell us -what we think is- her success story and what it has to do with SPARK and our community. What can we learn from her path and her new startup? We are looking forward to an inspiring talk and an interactive discussion to find out how these findings can help us shape our translational microenvironment.