Innovation Navigation: Road Map from Idea to a Successful Company

Entrepreneurs’ Network Cambridge Meeting

The ENET meeting on September 19, 2017 is on mapping from an idea to a successful company. What is innovation? How is the success defined? Where to start, which steps to pursue, is there a specific process?

How to create value? How to start an entity and how to commercialize & grow it? How to go plan an exit?

Innovation is a process of matching market needs to technological capabilities and conducting research during product conception, design, manufacturing & marketing. Commercial success depends on users’ cost & performance requirements.

Technological innovation is the act of developing and putting to use new product, processes & services. Innovation requires that these be adopted by users. Many inventions are never put into practice because they are technologically infeasible or fail the commercialization process.
You have a great novel idea and you can put it to great use while generating sizable revenue, but do not know where to start or how to go about it. Our commercialization and marketing experts are here to help.

AGENDA:

6:00 -7:00 pm – Networking
7:00 -7:10 pm – Announcements
7:10 -7:25 pm – E Minute – Up to 3 Startup companies’ presentations
7:25 -8:15 pm – 3 expert speakers on the night’s topic
8:15 -8:30 pm – Q & A
8:30 -9:00 pm – Networking including meeting speakers
Below please meet the panel of accomplished executives and experts and our moderator, who was also the meeting organizer.

SPEAKERS:

Eugene Buff, MD, PhD

Dr. Eugene Buff is a Registered Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP) and Certified Licensing Professional (CLP) with over twenty years of combined scientific, consulting and management experience. He has substantial expertise in a wide variety of industries, including but not limited to healthcare, biotechnology, medical devices, consumer products, materials and chemical manufacturing.

Dr. Buff is a Founder and President of Primary Care Innovation Consulting (PCIC), a new type of innovation management and business development firm supporting companies’growth through open innovation. PCIC provides technology strategy consulting for both large and small companies globally and has unique access to cutting edge innovation at universities, incubators and accelerators worldwide. Its signature product, Innovation Navigator™ offers comprehensive business development support by combining known theories (such as Lean Start Up, “Jobs-To-Be-Done” and Disruptive Innovation) with years of successful consulting practices. Dr. Buff also designed and teaches “Customer Driven Technical Innovation for Engineers”, a core course for Entrepreneurship Minor at Northeastern University, Boston.

Dr. Buff earned his Master degree in Biochemistry as well as his Medical Doctor degree from Russian State Medical University. He is a Ph.D. in Genetics and is a coauthor of 14 papers in peer reviewed international journals. Eugene is an active member of the Licensing and Technology Transfer community and serves on several committees and task forces at AUTM and LES. He is a member on many consulting and professional network organizations and often mentors and presents on issues of Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, Innovation and Technology Transfer both in US and internationally.

Susu Wong

Susu Wong is the Founder and Principal of Tomo360, a marketing agency that helps small to medium-sized businesses and nonprofitsin their digital marketing and online promotions. She was an Adjunct Professor in Marketing at University of Massachusetts Lowell, and a frequent speaker/instructor at entrepreneur and small business centers.

Susu has twenty years of experience in marketing, business development and technology licensing for Fortune 500, high-tech, biotech, higher education, and healthcare organizations. She was formerly the Associate Director of Business Development and Technology Transfer at Addgene, where she focused on developing marketing programs to enhance communications with academia and life science companies.

Before joining Addgene, Susu was a Business Strategy Manager in the Innovation Office at Partners Healthcare, where she created successful marketing campaigns for high profile, multi-million dollar medical research portfolios at Massachusetts General Hospital. She also spearheaded their social media strategies and email marketing campaigns. Earlier in her career, Susu was a Product Program Manager at IBM. She was involved in the creation of their e-business vision that integrated IBM’s software products.

Susu is an advocate for helping women advance their careers. She is a co-founder of Women Accelerators (formerly de la Femme), a nonprofit organization that provides networking, mentoring and educational programs to help women in advancing their career goals. She holds an Masters of Science in IT Management from Lesley University, and earned certificates in digital marketing from Northeastern University and in website design from Georgetown University.

Using her diverse business experience, Susu and her team have successfully helped business owners and entrepreneurs with their marketing strategies — integrating branding, website designs, social media, search engine optimization, and email marketing.

Regina Au

Regina Au is Principal, New Product Planning/Strategic Commercial Consultant at BioMarketing Insight with 25+ years experience in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical device, diagnostic and healthcare industries. She helps companies to maximize the benefits of their technology by conducting the business due diligence early in product development to de-risk the process and increase commercial success. This ensures that the technology is the right product for the right market in meeting a critical unmet need and that the market opportunity for the product meets the business goals of the company. She will translate these unmet needs into a target product profile (TPP) or commercial profile. Ms. Au then develops marketing strategies to ensure market access and product adoption.

She is a member of the Advisory Board for Regis College Master of Regulatory and Clinical Research Management Program. Ms. Au also serves as an advisor for the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center Platform Meetings, Advisory Board member for an entrepreneur team at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT, an Executive Judge for Entrepreneurship at Suffolk University and NHHTC Entrepreneur Forum, and a mentor for The Boston Club, AWIS and Women Accelerators.

Regina has written and published numerous articles on market and technology trends in the industry. She is a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology & Pharmacotherapy and Industry Advisor for the European BioPharmaceutical Review Journal. Her expertise is in numerous therapeutic areas such as cardiology, interventional cardiology, infectious disease, immunology, surgery, gastroenterology, pulmonology and oncology.

Prior to BioMarketing Insight she worked for companies such as Merck & Co., Genzyme Corp., NMT Medical, and Radi Medical (St. Jude Medical) in various positions of increasing responsibility in new product planning, marketing and sales. She had P&L responsibility in managing six multimillion dollar product lines and has experience in upstream and downstream marketing including strategic marketing, product development, market development, product launches, and product management.

MODERATOR:

Dr. Nathalie Goletiani, M.D.

Dr. Nathalie Goletiani, M.D., inventor, founder and CEO of POWERFEM Therapeutics; Instructor in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Goletiani is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of POWERFEM Therapeutics, a company devoted to novel, networked treatment methods for the care of those suffering from substance abuse and mental illness. Her extensive clinical research into the hormonal effects of nicotine, opioid and cocaine use lead her to new concepts and mechanisms in understanding and treating psychiatric disorders, in particular, disorders experienced by underserved female populations. At Harvard’s McLean Hospital, she was charged with rebuilding and responsible for all the operations of Clinical Research Program, including simultaneously running multiple clinical trials. Based on her patented work, she founded POWERFEM Therapeutics, an independent company devoted to creating new treatments and healthcare solutions. POWERFEM incorporates novel disease concepts and treatments to design cost-effective, integrated mental and substance abuse care solutions across multiple provider networks.

Dr. Goletiani has received numerous national and international awards including most recently the Harvard Livingston Award for the investigation of complex underlying mechanisms in the neurobiology of women. She also received a Harvard University Zinberg Fellowship specifically to support her research on alcohol and drug use disorders. Her research provides a valuable basis for psychotherapeutic public policy decision making on issues of substance abuse and the integrated treatment of mental illness. She has extensively published the results of her research in peer reviewed journals. Nathalie completed basic and clinic fellowships at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical School. In addition, she has been trained at and conducted medical research at Tbilisi State Medical University, University of Amsterdam and King’s College in London.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION: Is accessible by public transportation, to the Kendall Square stop on the Red Line.
LOCATION: Pivotal Labs, 255 Main St., 6th FL, Cambridge. This building is in Kendall Square, just a couple doors down from the Cambridge Marriott heading toward Boston.

REFRESHMENTS: Pizza & soft drinks

COST AND RESERVATIONS: Free to ENET members and $10 for non-members. Members & non-members, pre-register for the meeting online, until midnight the day before the meeting. Go to – www.boston-enet.org If you cannot pre-register, you are welcome to register and pay at the door.

PARKING: The nearest parking garage is at One Broadway. The fee is $10 after 5pm, you need to be out by 10pm. Details at: https://www.parkme.com/lot/115647/one-broadway-garage-cambridge-ma