Erwinions

HP Silver

OVERVIEW

We have thought carefully about how our project is safe, responsible and good for the world by considering the impact it could have in the economic, social, and legal aspects. That´s why, we have developed an ambitious Human Practices project that ensures the biosafety of our project with the creation of law-regulated protocols, a public policy that seeks to make the biotechnology products (like ours) available to everyone considering social necessities, and an entrepreneurship project that helped us notice if Erwinions is a viable product. All of them had been presented or validated by either federal dependencies or international companies, depending on the case. For comprehension, we have separated the three aspects of our project briefly describing each.

Legal

As a fundamental and structural part of our project, we wanted to make sure that our Human Practices developed into a tangible effect on the project. To achieve this we started by analyzing the possible problems that could happen based on the present law and regulation in Mexico by implementing the project. With a Human Practices team conformed by law students also, we realized that according to the current regulation in Mexico, there weren't enough clear guidelines that could make our project or other alike, viable and safe by the standards of Mexican and International Law.

In consequence of that, we decided to create two Mexican Official Norms (NOM´s), that would have a general and mandatory character, along with a validation paper based on national regulation like The General Law of Ecological Equilibrium and Protection to the Environment, Biosecurity Law of Genetically Modified Organisms, General Health Law as well as international regulation based on The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The NOM´s aim to provide the legal guidelines for our project and anybody interested in the making of Genetic transformation or Chromosomic insertion. To validate the above we resorted to the Ministry of Agriculture, Cattle Raising, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (for its acronym in Spanish “SAGARPA”) and the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (for its acronym in Spanish “SEMARNAT”), we documented all the feedback and the validation that directly affected and shaped our project, as well as the final text of the NOM´s for future project of law.

Economic

The relevance of developing a new idea in the biotechnology industry has an impact not only in the biological but also in the economic sector. We sought to develop a business model of our product in order to verify the viability of taking on count the needs of our customer segments; from small producers to well-established companies. The way in which this process took place was by the implementation of the lean method, which consisted of an initial hypothesis that was constantly changing until we found a pattern of pains and gains that our customer segment required to be helped with. That’s how we try to hit the market; we intend to solve this critical problem faced by farmers with a more efficient product that will not only be affordable but also 40% profitable.

Every single deliverable was reviewed under the mentorship of the NOVA Entrepreneurship team from the Tecnológico de Monterrey, plus was validated from a business to customer approach with the help of "La Norteñita". Actually, this last interviewed gave us enough feedback and helped us to plan a protocol to demonstrate that our project actually works under more specific and natural circumstances.

Social

We considered that the economic and legal implications were fundamental in the making of our project but we realized that in order to give it a fully integrated sense, there was the need to take into account the social component in the equation. We noticed that the biggest social challenge was that in a country like Mexico the synthetic biology and the results of it are somehow out of reach for so many people. Because of that, we developed a Public Policy project to be presented to the executive branch of the Government, which establishes general guidelines that they must follow to guarantee the Human Right of every Mexican to benefit from the new technologies like Erwinions as a part of a solution to persistent social problems like starvation and lack of nutritional food in poor communities that suffer from marginalization. The Public Policy is mainly based on the Human Right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, established by the third inform (A/HRC/20/26) of the Special Relator about cultural rights of the United Nations Farida Shaheed.

If you want to learn more about our Gold Criteria and Integrated Human Practices, click here.

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