Day 1: Discover
Nordic Bioventures (NBV) facilitated the program and led the matchmaking and ideation workshops on the first day. It was also important for the participants to get to know each other and their team. The facilitators explained the double diamond methodology: discover, define, develop and deliver. Together facilitators and participants created a fun and safe space that really laid the groundwork for the rest of the week.
The participants presented their initial ideas, and Christian Code concluded the day. He talked about his experience as an academic scientist who became an entrepreneur.
Day 2: Define
On Tuesday, the participants learned from Christoffer Merrild, Therese Eilertsen and Anna Apartsina of the non-profit organizations Synapse - Life Science Connect and Nucleate, who support young researchers pursuing (entrepreneurial) careers in the life science environment. Bouke de Jong spoke about startups he worked on, Tracey Beyer on corporate innovation, and Alexander Johann Bjørnå on intellectual property right law.
Day 3: Develop
On Wednesday, the participants worked on developing their ideas further. They did this through an inspiring talk from Thomas J. Howard on scaling and the hype curve, they learned about tech transfer from Digital Life Norway's board member Tom Pike, about how to accommodate different people in your team (Søren Spanner Bach), and ethics (Megan Palmer).
They were also wowed by Mash Makes, a startup that aims to move one gigaton of carbon from the atmosphere by 2040.
Day 4: Deliver
On Thursday the ecosystem REBBLS (Belinda Escher, Jannik Faliu) taught the participants about partnerships and roadmapping your project.
they also learned about fundraising (Line Holst Graves) and pitching (Benjamin Hamelmann). Most importantly, they had a pitch hackathon, to prepare them for pitching day!
Day 5: Demonstrate
The atmosphere on Friday morning was expectant, intense, and a little bit nervous. It was the final day of the Mini MBA. The participant teams pitched their ideas to real investors in the Human Health and Wellbeing or Planetary tracks. Alex Felman (Felman Family Office) and Kamil Bakowski (Lundbeck/REBBLS) were judges and advisors for the pitches and were impressed with how far the teams had come in a week.
The prizes were excellent: the top four received IP assessments from legal experts Bryn Aarflot, and the two top in each their track received entrepreneurship mentoring, and university grants for travel, training, IP work or other consultancy.
The nuts and bolts of venture capital
Tovy Dinh of Hadean Ventures was our final speaker. Hadean Ventures is a life science venture capital fund that invests in healthcare in Norway. Tovy explained the Venture Capital Fund life cycle and stayed around for the pitch final, when the winners from the Health track were pitted against the winners from the Planetary track.
Happy winners
Anders Nygaard, Nils-Anders Labba, and Haja-Sherief Musthafa won for their project PETdegrade, an idea that provides a solution for upcycling PET plastic. In second place were Rohit Agarwal, Kimji Pellano and Himanshu Buckchash with their idea which aims to bring calm to your house.
