Blackstone LaunchPad

UCC Blackstone Launchpad is an experiential entrepreneurship programme open to staff and students in UCC. They are specialists in aiding start-ups to build an effective business plan, overcome obstacles and grow their business. Our iGEM team identified Blackstone Launchpad as excellent potential mentors, to aid us with building out the idea of our biosensor project, effectively carrying out market research and aiding us in our presentation and outreach skills. This turned out to be the case as Peter, Alexis and Trish’s experience proved invaluable in each of these areas (pictures below). While our iGEM team was made up of multidisciplinary students, none of us were from a business background and we had very little experience in this area. Blackstone Launchpad’s expertise helped us more effectively gather and analyse the market research behind our project. Their help in building out our project idea and project plan was immensely useful and streamlined our work together as a team, making accomplishing tasks much more efficient. Their experience in aiding start-ups to build effective pitches and presentations, we found, proved to be one of their greatest contributions to our team. They gave us the confidence and skills to present clearly and effectively and this was a major bonus to our team. Additionally, the fact that they’re backgrounds were in business rather than science, helped us to avoid the pitfalls of using overcomplicated and scientific language when presenting, one of the key aspects when presenting a project to an audience that know nothing about it. UCC iGEM would like to thank Peter, Alexis and Trish for all their help throughout our iGEM project, without which our project would have run less smoothly.