Ten tips for enterprising doctoral students

Doctoral students can make great entrepreneurs

It is sometimes assumed that students carrying out research have their career mapped out for them as academics or in a corporate or public research institute. Although there is recognition that skills developed during a PhD can be useful in a non-research career, it is important that PhD students recognize that the skills learned in doctoral research can be particularly useful for a career as an entrepreneur.

Below find ten suggestions, which I hope will be helpful to doctoral students thinking about becoming an entrepreneurs.

1. Recognise and develop your entrepreneurial skills

To be a successful researcher - you must be enterprising – that is bold, resourceful, creative, dynamic and single-minded. When carrying research you will be required to solve apparently insurmountable problems, to come up with original ideas, to ensure that what you are doing is new, to understand what is technically feasible. All this and you have to be willing to work REALLY hard! These characteristics are also found in successful entrepreneurs – so as a research student it is important that you recognize you have these skills. It is also important to continue to develop these skills and to gain complementary experience to develop new skills.

So it is important that you recognize your strengths and weaknesses and then identify how you acquire any missing pieces!

If, as many do, you are thinking about a postdoctoral position then perhaps consider the type of position that will maximize and diversify your skill set.

2. Make use of readily available resources to hone your skills and to become more innovative

It is likely that there are lots of locally available resources, so make sure you use them. You should also make sure you are aware of and join national societies and online forums especially social networking groups. Ensure that you go to events for networking and information gathering and enter business competitions. These activities are important because they give you practice at pitching your ideas to experienced investors and entrepreneurs and help you create a network of people who can help you. Find out whether there is a local postgraduate enterprise society – if not set one up!

Meeting people from diverse backgrounds can be really stimulating. Sometimes ideas developed in one area can be used to great effect in other areas – and this can be at the heart of high impact innovation and the creation of successful business ventures.

3. Be honest with yourself about what you really want to do

Setting up a business is not an easy option and requires dedication, hard work and focus. However if your love your subject and want to be your own boss, then maybe its for you. All subjects can be harnessed for business opportunities, not just science, technology, engineering, medicine etc. For example some areas of arts and humanities can provide a unique insight into human behaviour, motivation and communication – all critical for creating a successful business.

4. Pilot the idea and test the market

Of course this is easier in some areas than others – but if you have an idea for a product and can make it – then setting up an online shop is pretty easy and can be a great way to start trading.

Ask your supervisor / advisor whether they have thought about setting up a business – if so maybe they have some ideas about low cost / low risk pilot studies.

5. Get some business experience

Most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met tell me that the most important first step for budding entrepreneurs is to get some work experience. Many PhD programmes provide this already – but if you are not on one that does so – try and include some work experience into your own research degree. Remember also, industrial postdoctoral positions can give you some of that valuable experience – which can help you in considering a business venture.

6. Be persistent - but realistic

Stubbornness and dedication are important attributes for successful entrepreneurs – and for you as successful research students. You will almost certainly encounter people who will tell you that your idea cannot make a business. They may be right, but not necessarily.

The trick is to know when to quit, sometimes that’s easy – an absence of money can often help concentrate the mind. However if you think you have a good idea and have the means to make it happen – give it a go and if you fail – try again!

7. It does not have to be just about money

Not all businesses are solely about the bottom line. So if you think you have a solution to a societal problem, maybe setting up a business can help you achieve that. You might consider setting up a Social Enterprise – a business with a social mission, and in which you reinvest any “profit” back into your business.

8. Do your homework!

Make sure you know your market. As a researcher you do this all the time, you know the value of identifying prior work, prior successes and where your work fits in. Its worth remembering sometimes a minor tweak of an idea can be a game-changer and create a great business opportunity.

9. Find a mentor

Every successful business requires energy, enthusiasm, dedication, passion etc. Almost all of them will also need an experienced mentor. Most successful entrepreneurs are happy to help budding entrepreneurs. So if you have an idea for a business and need help from someone with experience ask around friends, family, colleagues. Remember the networks you create may also provide opportunities to identify mentors.

10. Plan for success but learn from failure

Research students tend to be smart, enthusiastic, hard-working people, who are creative and diligent. Therefore you should plan on the basis that you will be successful. So make sure you work on something that matters to you, no matter how ambitious. In planning for success you also need to think about successful upscaling of your business – what it is going to look like in five years time?

If you fail, don't worry – learn from your failures – just as in research. You know that research very seldom works out first time around and that learning from failure is an essential element of finding solutions to research problems. So as researchers you are ideally placed to understand that each failure is a step closer to success. Its not always easy to deal with failure – but it’s a vital part of being a successful researcher and entrepreneur.

In summary...these suggestions are not supposed to be a recipe for success – I don’t think anyone has that. However researchers are ideally placed to be entrepreneurs because to be a successful researcher you have to be enterprising.

Good luck

A Bond for the Big Society

David Cameron has come in for some criticism of his idea of a Big Society. Detractors claim that the concept lacks detail and is a tactic to divert attention away from the swingeing cuts that we face. However we all know examples of the profoundly important work that individual volunteers do in direct support of their community. The proponents of the Big Society seek to broaden the scope and participation in such activities and in so doing, create an additional benefit, which is a collective sense of working for our society.

For individuals to make voluntary contributions to society, they need to trust that their efforts will make a difference and be valued as a complement, rather than a cheap alternative, to public services. In that context we face a serious problem, because the lack of trust between the public and politicians, does nothing to reassure individual volunteers. Modern party politics is partly to blame. For example, politicians often highlight the apparent inefficiencies of the public sector, perhaps in part so that they can reassure us that front-line services will not be cut when there is less money available. The demonization of taxation (and by association the “Big State”), as part of the differentiation of political ideology is also unhelpful. Over time this rhetoric is deeply damaging, it erodes our trust in the public sector to deliver efficient public services and in politicians to act in the public interest, by the thoughtful and strategic distribution of public funds for the greatest good.

Mr Cameron’s attempt to establish a dialogue about the role of the individual in helping create a better society is welcome and a focus on that contribution to specific (often local) community issues is a sensible strategy for encouraging participation. However Big Society needs some refining. Firstly we need to stop the demonization of taxation (and the Big State) because we need to pay for public services, and secondly it needs government intervention to stimulate broader participation in a more structured and sustainable way.

So how might we proceed in a way that captures the imagination of the public, allows the public and politicians to start to re-build a collective trusting relationship and work together for the good of our communities? One possibility is an expansion of social enterprises, which are businesses that operate for specific social purposes and which reinvest any profits for those social aims. This is an idea, which should appeal to the coalition government and to our society, because it encourages endeavour, entrepreneurship, accountability and social responsibility. However like all businesses and public services, social enterprises need help and stimulation. They need mechanisms that bring together like-minded groups of people who have a common interest in a social issue. With widespread access to the internet and the development of clever social networking facilities such as Mapping for Change it has become easier to nucleate such activities. Social enterprises also need money and there are a variety of investors who have created funds for this purpose. For example Unltd is a charity that uses £100M endowment to provide loans to numerous social enterprises. The requirement for new financial mechanisms in support of Big Society activities has been recognized and Mr Cameron’s adviser on the Big Society, Lord Wei has suggested some potentially useful possibilities, including for example a Big Society ISA (http://bit.ly/bXHvq0).

There is a case to build on these ideas and find new ways to stimulate the generation of “social bonds” in support of social enterprises as a foundation for the Big Society. A social bond is issued in order to raise a sum of money from a variety of sources (individuals, companies etc), but which is, in effect, an interest-free loan (http://bit.ly/9C6XoS). The funds are then made available to social enterprises in the form of business-friendly loans, which can provide support for the activity. At the end of the term the capital is returned to the investors or recycled into new loans if the investors prefer. The benefit to the investor is that the funds are secure and being used for a social profit, and for many this offers an attractive alternative to the financial return currently offered by high street banks. There are many excellent examples of how such bonds have helped social enterprises and this provides an important context for a wider development that the Big Society demands.

A possible variation on the conventional social bond could be a new “National Social Enterprise Bond” that would be launched to stimulate the Big Society. The bond and the resulting funds, could be administered by an organization such as the Big Society Bank. If the government provided support from the regional growth fund (http://bit.ly/9QmZVS) to match pound for pound the investment from non-governmental sources it could generate a major fund (>£500M) for social enterprises. This would then be available for tens of thousands of new social enterprises, and immediately turn the Big Society idea into reality. Individuals and government would know that they could choose to recover their investment, at the end of the lifetime of the bond.

By issuing a National Social Enterprise Bond, the coalition government could launch a meaningful and substantive basis for the Big Society and encourage a decade of social entrepreneurship. Social enterprises are effective mechanisms for capturing and encouraging entrepreneurship for societal, rather than purely commercial imperatives. Large-scale participation in social enterprises could provide the basis for a transformation of the UK and offer a chance for millions of people to work together toward a more cohesive society with an enhanced sense of community. The creation of a National Social Enterprise Bond by the coalition government, would not simply provide the money required for social enterprises, it would also help rebuild mutual trust between the public and politicians. And that really would be a Big Society.

www.mappingforchange.org

www.unltd.org.uk

http://twitter.com/SteveCaddick

My first post and a bit about me as a scientist

I have been contemplating the idea of blogging for some time but never really been sure whether its worthwhile..However having managed to join the twittersphere (http://twitter.com/SteveCaddick) - and surely at present being the least followed tweetee? I thought I'd give full blown blogging a try.

So first an introduction to me as a scientist.

I am a Professor of Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Chemistry (www.chem.ucl.ac.uk) and you can find my scientific profile at http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/people/caddick/. My lab research interests are in making molecules (i.e. Organic Synthesis) and in the application of the principles of synthesis in chemical biology, medicinal chemistry and drug discovery. You can see some of our work at http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-8550-2009.

My group is funded by EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC, Wellcome Trust and a variety of companies including AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer and in the recent past Novartis and CEM Microwave Technology. We publish between five and ten papers a year.

In synthetic chemistry we are interested in new reactions - so trying to understand what happens when you put molecules together under certain circumstances - with a view to trying to mediate something new and ideally useful. A recent example of that is in our recent work published in Nature Chemistry (http://bit.ly/99tt1L) in which we took aldehydes and electron deficient alkenes and in the absence of any other chemical reagents mediated a bond forming reaction. This was important because, if as seems likely, the reaction proceeds via an acyl radical then we have shown that you can make carbon-carbon bonds under ambient conditions and without the need for reagents. Usually in organic chemistry reagents are required to generate reactive intermediates so we think that reactions that can take place using oxygen as a mediator could potentially be very important.

In recent years we have also had considerable success in developing novel palladium catalysts for cross coupling and amination reactions. With our long term collaborator Professor Geoff Cloke at Sussex (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/chemistry/profile510.html) we have developed palladium(N-heterocyclic carbenes) as very active catalysts in a variety of coupling reactions (Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, 2008, 6, 2820). We have also carried out a lot of work on structure and mechanism (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2003, 125, 10066)

The other major component of my lab's work is in the area of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry. We use our new methods in chemistry to make compound collections using diversity-oriented synthesis (Chemical Communications, 2006, 4814) which can then be used to generate new compound classes for biological studies, for example with Ari Fassati (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slms/people/show.php?personid=11453) we described new anti-HIV compounds (Chemical Biology and Drug Design, 2010, 75, 461 and with Tim Bugg we sought to develop some potentially new anti-bacterials (Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, 2009, 17, 3443). We also have a lot of interest in the use of synthetic chemistry to modify proteins and with our long term collaborator Dr James Baker (http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/people/Baker/index.html) we have been developing new approaches to the reversible chemical modification of proteins for example working with halo-maleimides we have been able to modify protein domains and peptides (e.g. Somatostatin) - for a key paper see: Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2010, 132, 1960.

The laboratory is full of talented young postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows who do all the work and I'm very grateful to all of them for all their hard work.

For a full list of papers, projects see http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/people/caddick/biog_pubs.html