Expand Your Mind: Scientist Entrepreneurs
by Miki Saxon
The media loves to focus on young entrepreneurs and Internet startups, most of which offer little real value and solve few problems—other than how to acquire more stuff or a greater online reputation. (Sarcasm intended.)
However, there are exciting things happening that look to solve real problems using real science in totally innovative ways.
One is an effort, driven by scientists, that is pushing to end the scientific elitism fostered by exclusive periodicals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine. It is a movement towards a kind of “open source” science that is gaining traction within the scientific community itself. There’s been an explosion of open access archives on which a scientist can not only share research results, but also find research connections and collaborators they would normally never meet.
Dr. Michael Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet.
The DIY movement has made itself felt in many areas of life, but I find none more fascinating than its application to biological research and is another push towards more open scientific endeavor.
“I want to generate the sort of tools that make it easy to do DIYbio at home.” –Cathal Garvey, Cork, Ireland, inventor of the DremelFuge, a small centrifuge that can be fabricated by a 3-D printer, who offers the plans free of charge via the Net.
But the pièce de résistance comes from the National Science Foundation, which announced last summer the founding of the Innovation Corps, a program to turn the scientists of academia into entrepreneurs. This is not a fluff piece or election year propaganda, nor are they twenty-somethings locked in their dorm rooms coding all night. NSF recruited serial entrepreneur and now professor Steve Blank to teach the program—and a very tough program it is.
These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. Each of the teams selected by the NSF had a Principal Investigator – a research scientist who was a University professor; an Entrepreneurial Lead – a graduate student working in the Investigator’s lab; and a mentor from their local area who had business and/or domain expertise. And they were hard at work at some real science.
Check out what the first teams have done so far.
All of these are signposts of a new wave of entrepreneurs who will do things differently.
Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho
