BT BUSINESS OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY:You've wowed them with your science project, but how do you earn money from it? BT's follow-on programme can help
EVERY YEAR, thousands of students apply to the BT Young Scientist competition. The event has become a major highlight in the Transition Year calendar and has generated some enormously beneficial ideas: more efficient sandbag shelters for use in natural disasters; the development of better food spoilage indicators; and, most recently, a simple but game-changing test for somatic cell counts in animals.
Once the competition is over, however, many successful category winners see their ideas disappear into the ether. Earlier this month, competition sponsors BT launched a new follow-on, the BT Business of Science and Technology Programme. At the three-day event, 53 Young Scientist category winners from across Ireland took part in workshops and talks, culminating in the presentation of real-world science case studies to a Dragons' Den-style panel of judges from BT, Microsoft, Enterprise Ireland and Engineers Ireland.
One individual winner, Katie O’Neill, and one group consisting of six students, won a third-level summer placement to work with some of Ireland’s leading scientists and researchers.
“The work was hard going but great fun,” says Katie, one of three students at Dominican College Wicklow who took third place in the senior chemical, physical and mathematical section at the Young Scientist exhibition. “I’m really interested in science, but I’d never had a keen interest in business. Now the connections are much clearer.”
Wendy Kennedy, a technology industry executive and award-winning professor, has written several books and given workshops throughout the world on commercialising innovative technology ideas. She guided the students through the process.
“We all took her advice and applied it to our own project,” Katie explains. “I was part of a group working on a commercialisation plan for a real project in development. Needlepatch is an alternative way of administering vaccines and shots, using microscopic needles which penetrate the pores, inject the medicine, and stop before a layer of nerve endings. We had to come up with a marketing plan, and quickly realised that this product would be perfect for people who suffer from a fear of needles (estimated at 10 per cent of the population). It was all about promoting the product in simple, easy to understand language that people could relate to.”
Julianne O’Connell and five other students, all from different schools, took the overall group award at the recent event. “We were given a DNA tracing programme for meat, which is currently in development, and we had to present a business plan for it,” says Julianne. “We pitched our idea in a room to six potential investors, and we had to present our project as if they would potentially invest money in it. Only one project was going to be backed, and we worked hard on ours. We gave a Powerpoint presentation to the panel, using some of the information that Wendy Kennedy gave us, and said that our product is different from what came before, that this is a new and more reliable technology, and that it will be of huge benefit to meat producers and consumers.”
Julianne says that her participation in the programme was useful. “It gave me a taste for business and science,” she says. “We learned some skills that we can apply to future entries in the BT Young Scientist competition and possibly to future businesses. We’ll get to spend two weeks with top scientific researchers from UCD, NUIG, and UL. I’m really looking forward to it.”
For more information visit btyoungscientist.ie
