Chemistry Entrepreneurship

doi:10.1515/ci-2025-0117

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Chemistry Entrepreneurship

Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 20. Januar 2025

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Aus der Zeitschrift Chemistry International Band 47 Heft 1

The world benefits when the research output of a chemistry student is commercialized to give a useful product. This requires an entrepreneurial mindset and understanding of the requirements of starting and running a business unit. The objective of a project recently initiated by the Committee on Chemistry and Industry is to create awareness about “Chemistry Entrepreneurship” and motivate chemistry students to become entrepreneurs. The project will help create more awareness of the opportunities and challenges in entrepreneurship and build bridges between academia and industry.

To achieve this objective, a series of webinars with successful entrepreneurs sharing their learnings and experiences is being planned. The first of such webinars, “Catalyzing Chemistry Entrepreneurship” took place on September 10 and featured Javier García Martínez and was moderated by Miguel Jimenez. The abstract of the main presentation is reproduced on the following pages.

A second webinar titled “From Lab to Market“ was staged on 22 November and featured Vladimir Gubala, current President of the Chemistry and Human Health Division and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of PocDoc. PocDoc is a digital health platform developed with the vision of allowing anyone with a smartphone or tablet to test themselves for a range of major diseases or conditions via a fingerprick of blood, receive a full health assessment that puts those results in context and then be offered solutions to address any health-related issues that arise. (https://pocdoc.co/). The interview was conducted by Lene Hviid, Global Key Account Manager Metals, Shell, and member of COCI.

“Catalyzing Chemistry Entrepreneurship”

by Javier García Martínez

Steps Involved in the Creation, Growth, and Exit of a Company, duplicated from Frank L. Jaksch, Chapter 1, We Need an Entrepreneurial Culture in Chemistry: Do You Have What It Takes to be a Chemistry Entrepreneur? in Chemistry Entrepreneurship, Wiley-VCH (2022), edited by J. Garcia-Martinez and K. Li.

Chemistry is a global endeavor that has greatly contributed to improving our quality of life by protecting us against illness and by putting food and clean water on our table [1]. But now, our global challenges are so big that only if we focus all our efforts in solving our most pressing problems we can create a sustainable and better future for all [2]. From climate change to our dependence on finite natural resources, many of our most global challenges require a technical solution that only better science and technology in general and chemistry in particular can provide [3]. During its almost 100 years of existence, IUPAC has created universally accepted chemistry nomenclature and terminology as well as a global platform to discuss and advance some of the most relevant topics on pure and applied chemistry.

Chemistry education is of particular importance. We must train, engage, and inspire the new generation of young chemists able and committed to building a more sustainable future [4–5]. In order to get there, science education, from primary school to college, needs to be reinvented to put the student at the center of the learning process and provide him or her with the skills needed to become a more complete and creative scientist.

There is still a significant gap between academia and industry that needs to be bridged by bold entrepreneurs able to connect these two worlds and successfully commercialize the new and exciting research carried out in universities. Entrepreneurship is another important part of the equation, taking the discoveries made in the lab to the market place is essential to implementing the solutions we need, and scientists have a key role to play here [6, 7]

References:

E. Serrano Torregrosa, J. Garcia Martinez, The Chemical Element: Chemistry´s Contributions to our Global Challenges, WILEY-VCH (2011)
F. Gomollón‐Bel, J García‐Martínez, Chemical solutions to the current polycrisis, Angewandte Chemie 135 (25), e202218975 (2023)
F. Gomollón-Bel, J García-Martínez, Emerging chemistry technologies for a better world, Nature Chemistry 14 (2), 113-114 (2022)
E. Serrano Torregrosa, J. Garcia Martinez, Chemistry Education: Best Practices, Opportunities and Trends, WILEY-VCH (2014)
J. Garcia Martinez and P. Atkins, A Perspective on Chemistry Education, Chemistry International, vol. 37, no. 4, 2015, pp. 8-9. https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2015-0403
J. Garcia Martinez, The Third Way: Becoming an Academic Entrepreneur, Science Careers, March 20, 2014
E. Li, J. Garcia Martinez, Chemistry Entrepreneurship, WILEY-VCH (2021)

Webinar moderator, Miguel Jimenez, is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, where he runs el Microbial Integration Group. The group integrates engineered microorganisms with mechanical and electronic devices for applications in human health, agriculture, the environment, and entertainment. Miguel received his B.A. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, with Damian Young and Stuart Schreiber as a Herchel Smith Undergraduate Fellow and then received his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Columbia University Virginia Cornish as a National Science Foundation Fellow. Miguel completed his postdoctoral work with Robert Langer at MIT as a Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) Fellow and was most recently a Research Scientist with Giovanni Traverso at MIT.

The next webinar will be on 5 February, and discussing “Not-for-profit and Social Entrepreneurship.” Presenter Amy Cannon, is Executive Director and Co-Founder of Beyond Benign (https://www.beyondbenign.org/). The organization develops and disseminates green chemistry and sustainable science educational resources that empower educators, students and the community at large to practice sustainability through chemistry. The discussion will be facilitated by Francesca Kerton, from the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, and chair of IUPAC CHEMRAWN.

For more information and comment, contact Task Group Chair Bipul Saha <drbipulsaha@gmail.com> or Hemda Garelick <h.garelick@mdx.ac.uk> | https://iupac.org/project/2023-012-2-022/

Published Online: 2025-01-20

Published in Print: 2025-01-01

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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