Zikria Syed is the CEO and cofounder of VitalTrax. He has accumulated a vast amount of experience at world-leading companies like Microsoft and Siemens Medical Systems and is a serial entrepreneur who has founded, and successfully grown and exited multiple companies.

What is VitalTrax?

VitalTrax is a technology company with the mission to transform patients’ experience in clinical trials. To that end, VitalTrax delivers a cloud-based solution that enables patients to participate in clinical trials.

We recently launched Wing (www.patientwing.com), a clinical trial network that connects patients to clinical trials. Wing makes it very easy for patients to find and apply to clinical trials. Similarly, it allows pharmaceutical companies and clinical trial sites to publish and promote their trials and reach out to patients.

What were you doing before creating VitalTrax?

Prior to VitalTrax, I founded and led another technology company, NextDocs. NextDocs grew to become a multi-national serving five of the top ten pharmaceutical companies. I sold NextDocs in 2015.

What needs to change in Clinical trials? How does VitalTrax solve these problems?

The promise of new treatments has never been greater. Advances in sciences such as personalized medicine and gene therapy are giving hope to millions by potentially creating cures for untreatable diseases such as cancer and rare diseases. Currently, there are over 5,000 new medicines under development and over 55,000 clinical trials running. This has created a huge challenge because while new potential treatments and clinical trials are on a rapid rise, the number of patients available to participate in clinical trials has remained stagnant. In fact, lack of patients is the #1 reason for clinical trial delays and failures.

The good news is that the industry recognizes the need to address this problem and there are several efforts underway to increase awareness of clinical trials. Lilly Trial Guide is a good example of how a pharmaceutical company is increasing awareness of clinical trials. While these efforts by pharmaceutical companies are critical, a more central approach to patient enrollment is needed. There needs to be a clearinghouse or a marketplace for clinical trials where patients can find and enroll in trials and sponsors and sites can publish and promote their trials. This is where we come in with our Wing Clinical Trial Network. It is a first of its kind offering that acts as a marketplace – enabling patients to find and enroll in trials. The solution works a bit like OpenTable, where patients find trials that meet their needs and request/book appointments based on available times published by the research sites for screening visits.

For this marketplace to work effectively, we need to treat patients as consumers, who want to make informed choices about their healthcare (in this case, a clinical trial they may be participating in), expect assistance in the transaction (think Amazon one click ordering) and finally, want to know who they are dealing with.

Can you see the technologies you are creating at VitalTrax being applied to other industries within the medical and pharma sphere?

In most industries today, consumers have tools to manage their transactions. Think e-commerce, banking and travel. In each of these industries, consumers can conduct most of their transactions online. That is not the case in healthcare. Our mission is to enable that type of experience in clinical trials where patients are in control of their choices of trials and participation. We think that our work in clinical trials which is a specialized healthcare scenario can be leveraged in the broader healthcare industry.

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

Without a doubt, the team. We have an amazing team with endless passion and drive to make a positive impact on healthcare by changing how clinical trials are run. Our team collectively has dozens of years of experience in building secure, compliant and scalable technology solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. But what makes us special is our experience in building consumer-oriented applications. We think that is exactly what is needed to build solutions that can bring patients into clinical trials.

You have an extensive history creating companies, what advice would you give those who have an idea but don’t know how to develop it?

Market validation is perhaps the most important aspect of developing a new business. First, you need to make sure there is a market. Second, you need to understand how your offering is differentiated from others and why someone will choose it over existing choices.

Where do you see VitalTrax in five years?

We want to measure our success in terms of the impact we make. I hope that our work in improving patients experience in clinical trials leads to a world where patients actively participate in clinical research as partners.

Follow Zikria @zsyednd

Thanks to the University City Science Center for introducing us to some great entrepreneurs that featured in our Founder Friday blog series!

The post #FoundersFriday with Zikria Syed appeared first on Digital Science.

For this edition, we have interviewed Joe Karaganis, vice president at The American Assembly, a public policy institute at Columbia University and founder of The Open Syllabus Project (OSP). The OSP is an effort to create the first large-scale online database of university course syllabi as a platform for the development of new research, teaching, and administrative tools.

What made you want to launch The Open Syllabus Project?

We weren’t the first to take an interest in analyzing syllabi. There have been small-scale studies of curricula based on syllabus collections since at least the 1980s. Faculty began posting syllabi online in the late 1990s and many universities were doing so by the late 2000s. Dan Cohen, a history professor at George Mason, was the first to take advantage of these changing faculty and school practices to build collections on a large scale from the web-based in the early 2000s.  By the time we got started in 2013, the ability to not just collect but also data mine large collections was within the reach of small research teams like ours. In short, interest in syllabi had been there for some time, but the conditions for doing more than small-scale analysis took a while to emerge.

My own interest grew out of frustration with debates about the identity of the field of media and communications studies, which I had moved into in the mid-2000s. These debates were very focused on what the field should be – more empirical, more theoretical, more policy-focused, and so on, but no one had a good empirical account of what the field was. I saw syllabus analysis as a way to answer that question, based on the simple idea that a field is the knowledge it chooses to reproduce through teaching. At the time, this was a small data research idea, but the initial work proved to be very laborious and I didn’t get very far. Five years later, I was able to come back to it with collaborators who thought we could treat it (and questions about fields and canons more generally) as a big data problem.

Why is it important to create a database of University course syllabi?

Universities basically do two things: teach and research. The research process generates a full public record via books and articles, through which people can understand the nature of the work and its outcomes. Teaching has been much more opaque, even within the university system. Many large schools have only an approximate idea of what’s taught in their own programs – much less what others are teaching.

Syllabi are the main record of this side of the university mission. As we are beginning to discover, understanding them has implications for many of the groups in and around teaching, including students, faculty, administrators, libraries, and publishers.

Can you list current and potential applications The Open Syllabus Project has?

We’re just beginning to explore these. Currently, our online tool, the Syllabus Explorer, has a lot of value for the creation of new courses. It’s easy to see, for example, what texts are taught together. We’ve also created a new publication metric called ‘Teaching Score,’ based on the frequency with which texts are taught. We think it has the potential to become comparable in significance to journal impact metrics, but based on a very different set of judgments about what’s important. Our next round of work will focus on creating demand metrics for Open Educational Resources and on using assignment sequence to build a tool that can generate learning pathways through any topic.

Other than working on The Open Syllabus Project – what takes up the majority of your days?

Most of my work in recent years has been research surrounding copyright and access to knowledge. I’ve recently completed a big collaborative study called, Shadow Libraries, which explores how students get the materials they need for their university educations (spoiler: they photocopy). We had teams working for several years in seven countries to document the student, university, and publisher ecosystem around this question. We’ve also done quite a bit of work on copyright enforcement and intermediary liability – most recently with regard to understanding the impact of software automation on notice and takedown practices

What does the future have in store for The Open Syllabus Project?

We’re about to launch the next version of the Syllabus Explorer, which will be much bigger and better than the current Explorer. This has been the focus of our efforts over the last 18 months and should make the value and potential of the project much clearer. I look forward to exploring all the possibilities that the new Explorer will offer!

Joe tweets @jjkaraganis. You can find out more about The Open Syllabus Project here.

The post #FoundersFriday with Joe Karaganis appeared first on Digital Science.

#FoundersFriday provides a platform for our interviewees to discuss their entrepreneurial journey and their perspective on the science and tech industry as a whole. Through running this blog series, we hope that our readers will learn essential information about growing a business and will be encouraged to pursue their entrepreneurial goals.

Suw Charman-Anderson is the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of the achievements of women in STEM. Each year, ALD hosts a flagship science cabaret event in London, while independent groups put on their own events around the world. During October, Digital Science publishes a selection of content focused on issues that Suw has brought to the world through her organisation. See what we got up to last October.

What is Ada Lovelace Day?

Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), held on the second Tuesday of October. It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM.

Each year we organise our flagship Ada Lovelace Day Live! ‘science cabaret’ event in London at which women in STEM give short talks about their work. Around the world, there are also dozens of independently organised grassroots events. The media get involved too, and we always see dozens of articles about women in STEM in a wide variety of science, news and women’s interest publications.

What were you doing before creating Ada Lovelace Day?

I was working in tech as a social technologist. I’d had a brief spell working as a freelance music journalist in the late 90s, before learning to write HTML and becoming a web designer. I worked in web design for a few years up until the Dot Com Crash, which put me out of work for about nine months. After that, I launched my own online language learning start-up. That didn’t work out and I then fell into “blog consulting” in 2004, before the term “social media” had been coined. I had my own consultancy working with household brands around the world until I moved to America with my husband in 2014. That, coincidentally, was when I started to get appreciable sponsorship for Ada Lovelace Day, enough that I could take a risk and work on it full-time.

Why is it necessary to raise awareness of the issues women face in STEM fields?

There are several reasons why we need to increase awareness of the biases against women, both practical and moral.

Practically, there are several industries such as engineering and technology where we just don’t have enough people, and if we’re to see these industries succeed as they ought to, we’re going to have to make sure that we’re not putting women off. We need to address sexist attitudes and practices and make sure that women feel welcomed into STEM and can meet their full potential. We just can’t afford to let all that talent go to waste.

We also have evidence that diverse groups are better at solving problems, and that’s diverse along all axes, not just gender. Any company that wants to excel ought to be addressing discrimination and gender bias, along with other biases, as a matter of urgency.

Morally, we need to address sexism simply because it’s fair. If we want to move towards a society where everyone gets the chance to pursue their dreams and fulfill their potential, we have to address the systemic, institutional and social barriers that women and minorities face.

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

There are several moments where I have felt really proud of what Ada Lovelace Day has achieved. When I received an email from one of the first indie events organisers in a language that wasn’t English, that was certainly an amazing moment. Communicating with people via the medium of Google Translate is a little worrying, but it was fabulous to know that the day resonates outside of an Anglophone cultural context.

But what I’m most proud of is when I hear from people who’ve been involved in ALD in some way that it has led to a new opportunity or has inspired them. I’ve had lovely messages from past ALD Live speakers who’ve got conference invitations, book deals and places on international leadership development courses because of their talks. And, it’s even better when I get emails from young women in the audience who are inspired by our events and the work we do and who want to pursue a career in STEM!

Of course, with something as international as ALD, I rarely hear back from the people who are inspired, as they often don’t know that there’s someone sitting in the middle of it all, trying to make it happen!

What advice would you give those who have an idea but don’t know how to develop it?

I think it’s important not to be scared to start, even if you eventually discover that you started in the wrong place. There’s a huge amount of advice on the web about how to assess your idea and plan first steps, but one of the most important things is to look at the people in your personal network and talk to them. It can be surprising how much expertise our friends and family have, and they are often willing to help too. Women entrepreneurs, especially, are usually supported by friends and family because it’s a lot harder for them to get funding.

It’s also important to find your peer group, develop relationships, and talk to them about your idea. There are all sorts of communities online, so find the ones in your area, join them, contribute to them, and you’ll find all sorts of advice and help!

Where do you see Ada Lovelace Day in five years?

I am currently working on a new project – an online careers fair for women in STEM in the UK, which is planned for November. I want that to become an annual event, maybe even running it twice a year if the demand is there. Given that when women graduate they are statistically more likely to end up in low-quality jobs, and that there are issues around how companies write things like job descriptions and HR marketing materials, there’s a lot of work to do on the careers front.

In five years, I’d like to see the online careers fair well established and to see a lot more indie events around the world happening on Ada Lovelace Day itself. We usually get about 80 events each year and I’d like to see that doubled or tripled.

As an organisation, I’d love to be able to hire more staff. My dream team would be to have a graphic designer, a historian, an education expert, someone doing outreach, and a biz dev person in full-time roles. If I had a team like that in five years, I’d be very happy!

If you would like to find out more about Suw and her work, follow her @Suw and visit http://findingada.com/

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For this edition, we have interviewed Johannes Solzbach (@JoSole89), Co-Founder of Clustermarket, a company that is bringing the sharing economy to research enabling smaller institutions and individual researchers to access highly technical equipment for the first time.

Could you start by describing what Clustermarket does?

Clustermarket is an online marketplace helping scientists, engineers and other technology pioneers access equipment and services they need for their research and business. Universities, other research institutions and businesses offer their equipment and services listed on Clustermarket. The idea is based on the sharing economy concept and supports innovation by utilizing existing resources more efficiently.

How did your background help you to build Clustermarket?

My co-founder Tobias is a sports scientist and like many others in his profession, he experienced the problems Clustermarket aims to solve when conducting research at the German Sports University in Cologne. When he met my other co-founder Niklas, who has a unique understanding of how resources could be used more efficiently, the idea was born. Niklas’ background is in business, but he has a passion for coding, teaching himself how to do it in his free time – he is now responsible for the development of the platform.

My background is in finance, which is very useful when it comes to fundraising and running the business. None of us have started a company within the sphere of science and research, therefore, the feedback we have received has been invaluable in building a business our customers want.

Why is affordable access to science important?

The limited access to expensive equipment and important scientific services increases the barriers to entry and restricts innovation. Harvard professor Peter Galison believes that tools are a greater driver of scientific revolutions than ideas! Our goal is to break down these barriers to entry for science start-ups. Through Clustermarket, every good science idea will have the chance to become a breakthrough innovation, because you have affordable access to the resources you need within a few clicks.

What problems exist in bringing science technologies to the mass market?

The valley of death, meaning the funding gap when trying to develop a product from the idea stage to the proof of concept, is wider and deeper in the science industry than in any other industry. This is obviously related to the high-risk profile of many projects but also to the large amount of capital that is needed to take the project to the next stage. Many companies have identified that renting the resources they need for their research will lower their R&D expenses significantly and will get them closer to bridging the valley of death. Unfortunately, young start-ups with limited financial resources usually cannot rely on an extensive network. With Clustermarket, our goal is to give scientists access to a community of like-minded peers that are willing to share not only their equipment but also their expertise including technical support.

How do you see Clustermarket developing?

We went through two accelerator programs, MassChallenge UK and the Merck Accelerator Program and also raised an Angel round which helped to launch Clustermarket within the Golden Triangle earlier this year. To date, we see increasing traction on the platform, which makes us confident that we can get established across the UK. The interest in Clustermarket from Europe and abroad is overwhelming. We are currently setting up pilots in Norway and Germany, which will hopefully lead to a wider expansion. The success of the marketplace relies on more providers who are willing to share their resources and support the great research projects of our customers. We have a long way to go to democratise scientific research but we believe we are on a good path.

Follow @clustermarket for their latest company updates and more.

The post #FoundersFriday with Johannes Solzbach from Clustermarket appeared first on Digital Science.

For this edition we have interviewed Euan Adie (@Stew), founder of our portfolio company Altmetric.

What made you decide to leave your job and launch your own business idea?

Well, I’d been working on Altmetric for some time on evenings and weekends. It was my pet project and I really wanted it to succeed, and my past experience was that – for lots of reasons, good and bad – it’d be better off outside of a large company. I also liked the challenge of knowing that if it failed it was because of something I was responsible for, rather than somebody else, and the freedom to work how I wanted with the people I wanted.

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

I’m proud of two things which I realize may seem quite hand wavy:

One is that we’ve got a mission – to help researchers get credit where credit is due – and to date we’ve been pretty good about following where it has taken us. I like us having that underlying drive and I’m proud that it seems to be working. Looking back, we’ve made non-trivial contributions to new thinking about scholarly communication and research assessment, and I think we can continue to do this in the future.

I’m also proud of having been able to find and work with the people in the Altmetric team. Watching people grow with the business, in particular, is awesome, as is seeing people do a much better job with something than I would have done by myself.

If you could go back in time and give your pre-startup self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I have two!

“Try to make friends with a lawyer and an accountant, they are expensive”

“It turns out nobody else knows what they’re doing either, so take advice from everybody (except the above) with a pinch of salt”

Suppose I have an idea for a tool, or a solution for a problem, within the research landscape and I want to develop my idea into a business. What would your advice to me be?

Be honest with yourself about whether or not it could be a commercial success, by which I mean can it support you financially as you develop it, not make you millions of dollars. Then don’t talk, do. Don’t feel like you need to be funded straight away (at least beyond seed funding if you can’t work a day job too).

I’m focusing on the financial aspects not because it’s the main reason you’d run your own business (if it is, my tip is to not work in the research space). I’m focusing on it because if you want to be working on it in three years then your ideas need to be footing the bill.

Working on an early stage start-up is hard but frankly so is staying in research. Plus this way you get to be your own boss straight away instead of in twenty years.

In the scholarly communication & publishing space, it’s often said that people have the same conversations again and again. Can you think of an issue that, in your view, people aren’t talking about enough?

I think there are lots and lots of small problems that we don’t talk about enough by some sort of weird convention. Like, why do I have to put the head of my lab as the last author on my paper even though she or he did no actual work? And the research assistant who did the actual experiment – they go in the acknowledgements rather than the author list?

I also think we’re not doing enough to reduce the stigma of being ‘wrong’ and retractions. I don’t mean for people who deliberately falsify results to make themselves look good, I’m talking about people who accidentally introduce an error into papers, who make a silly mistake they only discover later. You should be able to admit mistakes and get some credit for that.

What does the future have in store?

We’ve always focused more on engagement and impact, I’d love for us to do more around helping people assess the quality of research. It wouldn’t necessarily be in the same way we track engagement – I’m not sure you can ‘measure’ quality. I’m sure we could give people some pretty good tools & indicators though.

The post #FoundersFriday with Euan Adie from Altmetric appeared first on Digital Science.

We are very excited to bring you a new interview for our #FoundersFriday blog series! If you’ve missed our previous posts, Founders Friday is a forum  in which we interview the founders of different scholarly communication businesses, asking them to share their advice for others and their perspective on the industry as a whole.

For this edition, we have interviewed Juan Castro (@_jpcastrog_ ), Co-Founder of Writefull. Writefull promises to help users write with more confidence by allowing them to check words and phrases against databases of correct language, such as Google Scholar and Google Books. Writefull is one of two other companies (Simiary and Etalia) to be recently awarded a Digital Science Catalyst Grant!

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science adds:

“Writefull has the potential to become the everyday tool for researchers in any field. While solutions exist to help users with English grammar, Writefull’s focus on good language usage is what struck us as unique. Extend that to their ability to offer guidance within a specific field of English, such as academic writing, and you have a very powerful offering indeed.”

What is Writefull?

Writefull is an application that helps researchers improve their writing. It does this by comparing the researchers’ writing against databases of correct language.

We’re currently using four language databases:

• Google Books, containing data from 5+ million books. It currently consists of English books only.
• Google Web, consisting of data from Web pages that Google has indexed over the years, covering 36 languages.
• Google Scholar, providing data from academic papers and reports in a wide range of disciplines, covering nine languages.
• Google News, comprising data from over 4500 news sources worldwide, covering 35 languages.

Writefull is available for the major desktop operating systems including Windows, MacOSX, and Linux.

Researchers can use Writefull in any writing tool – from Microsoft Word to Gmail. They only need to select a piece of text, hit a keyboard short-key, and choose one of Writefull’s options.

Does your software apply to all fields of study? 

Communicating information correctly is vital to the dispersal of knowledge. Writefull helps researchers in all fields because it fetches language data from the multi-disciplinary database, Google Scholar. At this moment, we are working on building language databases for each academic discipline, so in time, Writefull will be able to provide bespoke feedback.

What were you doing before Writefull?

Before Writefull, I was doing a postdoc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Nottingham, UK.

What is natural Language processing? How is Writefull different from other grammar/language apps?

In a nutshell, Natural Language Processing (NLP) consists of the building of systems that can understand and generate language. NLP is an active area of research with many tasks including: Natural Language Generation/Understanding; Auto summarization; Machine translation and more.

Most grammar/spell checkers use rulesets to assess if a sentence is correct. The problem with this approach is that in many cases there are no clear-cut rules – the use of the comma in English for example. If rules do exist, they fail to assess language usage. That is, a grammar checker would fail to tell you that you don’t say “tall mountains” and “high trees”, but instead “high mountains” and “tall trees”. Writefull tells you this by looking at databases of existing language as an example of what to use.

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

I am most proud of having taken the rewarding, yet often difficult path of becoming an entrepreneur – it’s an extremely fulfilling endeavour!

How will the Catalyst Grant help further your vision?

The Catalyst Grant will enable us to create language databases for specific academic disciplines. This means that we will be able to offer researchers language feedback tailored to their area of research.

As a young start-up, what advice would you give those who have an idea?

I would suggest building a prototype and launching it as soon as possible; then get feedback from real users. An easy way to get some initial traction is by appearing on sites like Betalist. Once you have some repeat users, you should then reach out to them and find out how they use your app, why they use it, and how it can be improved – start applying what you’ve learned straight away. From that point, you should iterate and start thinking about how you could generate revenue.

Where do you see Writefull in five years?

In five years time, we would like to be the everyday writing tool for researchers throughout the world!

The post #FoundersFriday With Juan Castro From Writefull appeared first on Digital Science.

Priya Bhutani is the Founder of RegDesk and has been its Chief Executive Officer since 2013. Priya drew on her extensive experience in the medical device and regulatory industry to formulate a new way of approaching compliance needs by using a crowdsourcing model that connects clients with experts from around the globe.

What does RegDesk do?

RegDesk helps pharmaceutical and medical device companies answer the most critical market access questions by leveraging the world’s leading regulatory and reimbursement experts. Our approach of peer review coupled with machine learning allows our clients to receive objective and actionable intelligence quickly, and for a fraction of the cost of a consulting company. This allows our clients to make market access decisions faster and with a higher level of confidence. RegDesk essentially provides more accurate market access intelligence, faster and at a lower cost than consulting companies.

How did your background help you to build RegDesk?

I am a Biomedical Engineer by training. I worked as a product development engineer for a leading medical device company where I was responsible for taking a product from concept to launch. I had first-hand experience with the difficulties of taking a finished medical device to market because regulations not only differ by country but also by product and are incessantly evolving. I learned regulatory and reimbursement are the most significant hurdles faced by healthcare companies seeking to expand.

In my role as a regulatory consultant, I helped numerous medical device companies expand their products globally; I learned that regardless of the size of the company, regulatory challenges remain constant.

How do you connect clients with the right experts?

We are a regulatory and reimbursement intelligence engine. We do not simply connect clients with the right experts. We leverage the method of peer review, which entails engaging multiple in-country experts to provide validated actionable insights.

What challenges did you face when building expert communities?

Building our expert community wasn’t too challenging because these experts are looking for ways to market their services and increase their earnings. The real challenge is ensuring the experts are knowledgeable in the product area.

What problems exist in bringing medical technologies to the market?

As many as 80% of all drug and device applications get rejected by regulatory authorities for reasons unrelated to safety and effectiveness of the products.

Lack of understanding of the local requirements, misinterpretation of the guidelines, and misguided advice can all derail drug and device approval. The same reasons also cause companies to become non-compliant, thereby incurring hefty fines and losing credibility in the market.

Commercial and regulatory leaders at healthcare companies are seeking innovative solutions to predict potential risks and escalate speed to market.

What does RegDesk do differently to other consultancies working in this field?

We provide more accurate product & country-specific intelligence faster and at lower cost than consulting companies. Unlike consulting companies, the intelligence we provide is verified (through peer review), more detailed and evidence-based. With RegDesk, clients get full transparency to the experts who contributed to the intelligence.

Consulting practice relies on the advice of a single expert, making it a precarious business practice. Regardless of how experienced and knowledgeable the single source may be, the results are limited by the ingenuity and skills of one person who may misinterpret the nuances of the requirements, possess outdated information, and be biased by their own agenda. There is no transparency to the accreditation of the consultant providing the advice. Furthermore, consulting companies are limited to geographic footprint.

Does a heavily regulated industry limit or encourage development and innovation?

There haven’t been many technology advancements made in the regulatory and reimbursement space. The dynamic nature of regulations makes it challenging. But there is a definite need for innovation.

How do you see RegDesk developing?

We are striving to become the leading platform – the trusted source for regulatory and reimbursement intelligence. We want healthcare companies around the world to use RegDesk to predict potential risks and gain insights into the fastest pathway to market for their products. Our mission is to reduce the rejection rate by 30% and accelerate speed to market.

Find out more about RegDesk and what it offers. Follow @RegDesk for their latest news and more. 

The post #FoundersFriday with Priya Bhutani from RegDesk appeared first on Digital Science.

Founders of HipDynamics Davide Danovi & Maximilian Kerz

We are very excited to bring you a new interview for our #FoundersFriday blog series! 

If you’ve missed our previous posts, Founders Friday is a platform in which we interview the founders of different science and technology businesses, asking them to share their advice for others and their perspective on the industry as a whole.

For this addition we’ve interviewed Davide Danovi, lead at the HipSci Cell Phenotyping Unit at King’s College London and cofounder of HipDynamics, a London-born open source, data set interrogation tool in the field of cell and molecular biology. The software facilitates data visualisation and sharing through an intuitive dashboard, contextual analyses, offering data management capabilities between users and research groups. HipDynamics is one of our recent Catalyst Grant awardees. 

Steve Scott, Director of Portfolio Development at Digital Science adds:

“HipDynamics Pro impressed us during the Catalyst Grant process with their detailed submission and the team’s deep domain knowledge. Although at an early stage, their approach to developing the product hand-in-hand with end users gave the judging panel confidence that they will bring a truly useful product to market.”

To find out more about HipDynamics visit their website and follow Davide on Twitter.

The post #FoundersFriday with Davide Danovi from HipDynamics appeared first on Digital Science.

For this edition we have interviewed Jonathan Gross (@rubp), founder of Labguru.

What made you decide to leave academia and launch your own business idea?

I really valued the freedom that academic research provided. I enjoyed the life at the lab, working with great people and running experiments, but I felt that I didn’t have the patience required to become a really good scientist, I was too impatient to see the results of my research. I came from a computer science background, where you write the code and you can see where the issues are. I loved the technical challenged in my work and overcoming research obstacles but I was always drawn back to coding. At the time a startup company called 37signals open-sourced a new web framework called Ruby on Rails and launched Basecamp. I started playing with Ruby on Rails in my free time (while waiting for my plants to grow) and I thought of ways I could utilize it to help research labs.

If you could go back in time and give your pre-startup self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I started my company pretty much at the same time as starting a family. Succeeding in doing both is a real challenge. If I went back in time I would talk with other entrepreneurs to understand the effort it takes to launch a startup, so that my wife and I could better understand the road we are choosing. Eventually it all worked out for us but it was rough at times. Running a software startup is a demanding task, there is always stuff to do, and even more as you grow. You’ll need to have really good communication with your spouse to make it work. You’ll need to be self-aware and learn how to operate with less sleep! And you’ll need to know when to stop – go to bed and get back to a problem with a fresh mind. Self-control is key to the success of your business.

Suppose I have an idea for a tool, or a solution for a problem, within the research landscape and I want to develop my idea into a business. What would your advice to me be?

Go for it! You have the best intuition and until you start you can’t really know if it is a great idea and if it will catch on. Ideas are easy, success requires dedication, hard work and luck. Know that you can control only two of these parameters. Your passion is the key factor for success. Talk with as many founders you can. Learn from their mistakes, understand what they learned from it. Use available tools to control and prioritize your work – develop a framework that can evolve over time, your business needs to learn how to shift priorities as it grows.

“I believe to be able to conduct reproducible research labs need to set guidelines on how research is conducted and documented. If you can’t read your team member’s handwriting, in his physical lab notebook, then don’t expect to have reproducible results!”

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

I’m proud of many things. First would be my team, as on your own you can only take an idea so far. If you have a team behind you, that’s a great testament to your idea – that people are willing to invest their time into it. I’m proud of our users who bought into our vision of leaving the physical lab notebook behind. They are helping to shape how we do science, how we communicate results and failures within a lab.

In the scholarly communications and research tools space, it’s often said that people have the same conversations again and again, e.g. we need to improve reproducibility etc. Can you think of a particular issue that, in your view, people aren’t talking about enough?

The debate over reproducibility is an important one to have, but we try to look at it at the lab level – not at the publication level. I believe to be able to conduct reproducible research labs need to set guidelines on how research is conducted and documented. If you can’t read your team member’s handwriting, in his physical lab notebook, then don’t expect to have reproducible results! This discussion needs to start at an an earlier stage than publication, the problem isn’t just about the publication of un-reproducible results, it’s about lab procedures.

What does the future have in store for Labguru?

Labguru is evolving as our market evolves. There is still a lot I’d like to achieve with our offering to the market. We now focus much more attention on our experiment page, making it easier to do pretty much everything from one page, from typing in and planning an experiment to reviewing an experiment. The platform should make it easy to see the details of an antibody without navigating away. It should make it easier for PIs and project leads to communicate with the researchers on the bench. We work hard to remove data barriers, allowing faster data entry and linking the metadata with the physical samples. We have a great user base that provides us with key insights, so I’m pretty confident that going forward our roadmap is the right one.

The post #FoundersFriday with Jonathan Gross from Labguru appeared first on Digital Science.

 We provide editors at scholarly journals with a modern and affordable system to streamline peer review, publish open access research articles, or both. Our mission is to make trusted scientific knowledge available more quickly and at an affordable price. Currently, over 550 of the top academic journals use our platform.

Who are your main customers?

The post #FoundersFriday with Brian Cody from Scholastica appeared first on Digital Science.

For this edition we have interviewed Mark Hahnel @MarkHahnel, founder of Figshare.

What made you decide to leave academia and launch your own idea?

I never actually decided to leave academia, I always thought I’d continue in academia, and then my side-project which was Figshare, which was a way to make all my academic outputs available online, started getting some traction. Then I started talking to people about the idea that it could become a full-time job and that it could have legs. I handed my PhD in on the Friday and started at Digital Science working on Figshare on the Monday. But I never intended to leave academia, I was applying for postdoc jobs before Figshare took off.

If you could go back in time and give your pre-startup self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

I think there’s two things. Firstly, be confident in your intuition and your translatable skills you’ve picked up in academia, because you have been doing project management, you have been doing self-guided study and things like this. A lot of my friends in academia think that if you’re an academic you can only be an academic and that a lot of the skills aren’t as translatable as they are. Whereas the majority of the training you do in during a PhD and a postdoc is massively translatable to a wide variety of areas.

Secondly, at the beginning if somebody told me they were an expert in something I trusted that they were an expert in something, and if I didn’t have that expertise I took what they said as gospel. But while that helped moved things on a lot faster it’s sometimes turned out to be not true. You have to have a lot of trust in other people and you have to be able to delegate responsibilities. But that doesn’t mean, particularly at the beginning of a startup, that you shouldn’t try to have your eyes on everything that you’re doing, which is difficult.

Suppose I have an idea for a tool, or a solution for a problem, within the research landscape and I want to develop my idea into a business. What would your advice to me be?

My big advice here is to build something, build a ‘proof of concept’. Ideas are cheap, execution is expensive but if you can have something to demonstrate to other people, that serves a purpose, it’s a minimum viable product, other people can use it. It’s very easy to visually explain your idea once people can see something that exists. It’s a lot easier if you’re looking for investment when you can show that some people are using this. You don’t have to be good at coding, I’m a super hacky coder. I’m not allowed anywhere near the Figshare codebase at all anymore, and yet essentially the first Figshare was built on my code, using simple tools that were hacked together in order to be able to show people “this is what it does”. That’s my advice.

As the founder of a business, what are you most proud of?

I’m proud to have been able to grow a company environment where people enjoy coming to work and to keep pushing to do that and to have made lots of new friends in our team. And then specifically to Figshare, I’m proud that we have been able to build a sustainable business model whilst sticking to our core mission, which is the exact same thing we set out to do in the beginning. Using Figshare any academic can make any digital research output openly available online for free and we still allow that and our sustainable model that’s been built around that hasn’t actually hindered that in anyway.

In the scholarly communication & publishing space, it’s often said that people have the same conversations again and again. Can you think of an issue that, in your view, people aren’t talking about enough?

Specifically in the Figshare world people don’t talk about education and training and this gap between white papers that are written by funders, government bodies and societies and the actual researchers themselves, who don’t know what is coming. Particularly when it comes to data, the idea that they’re going to be forced to make all of their research outputs available online, where ethically and commercially OK to do so. The majority of researchers today in England and the US have no idea that this is going to be a requirement of them, they sometimes don’t know if this is a requirement of them already! The education around this changing landscape is something that is massively under-served.

Another thing in this echo chamber of “academia is broken, here are the things that are broken about it” is peer review. People do talk about it, but it’s only recently with things like pre-print servers for the life sciences, that you actually see people doing something about it. So there’s a lot of talk with no action, and I think that’s what is great about Digital Science, they will play with ideas with the understanding that not all of them are going to work, which is exactly what the Catalyst Grant is. For everything that’s talked about there needs to be an equal amount of people acting and building cool stuff.

What does the future have in store for figshare?

Having been first to market in this space, we’ve been able to develop a lot of functionality while keeping the platform intuitive for users. We’re going to spend this year developing fast, building lots of functionality, whilst maintaining an intuitive site, not getting sucked into feature creep and continuing to consistently do what we do well, without feeling that we need to do everything in this space.

The post #FoundersFriday with Mark Hahnel from Figshare appeared first on Digital Science.

We are very excited to bring you a new interview for our #FoundersFriday blog series!

If you’ve missed our previous posts, Founders Friday is a platform in which we interview the founders of different science and technology businesses, asking them to share their advice for others and their perspective on the industry as a whole.

For this edition, we have interviewed Patrick Speedie (@JPSpeedie), co-founder of IN-PART, the matchmaking platform that provides university technology transfer teams with access to a global network of research and development decision makers.

What is IN-PART? Why was creating IN-PART necessary?

There is a wealth of knowledge and innovation locked up within universities around the world that we want to enable to have an impact on society. Some of the world’s greatest innovations have come out of academic research (the Internet, Google, Penicillin, etc.), and we want to help more of these innovations get into the real world.

Our idea to assist this process was IN-PART, an online platform that makes the initial connection for technology transfer between universities and companies simple, efficient and scalable. We have built a system to showcase groundbreaking innovations from universities using matchmaking algorithms and natural language processing that match each technology (ranging from morphing wings for aerospace, to cancer therapies and complex polymers) with companies that have an interest in that area. Our goal is to connect them to discuss the potential of working together and also to encourage companies to give feedback to universities about possible routes to market. We also generate data relating to market feasibility which we feedback to each university team to help guide their projects toward commercialisation.

Where do you envision the space you work in going? What are the problems and what still needs to be done?

I believe that our sector will continue to grow at a rapid rate, most notably, internationally. Governments across the globe, including Australia, China, Japan and several countries in mainland Europe, are placing increasing importance on research commercialisation, viewing technology-transfer as fuel to boost their economies.  For example, the Chinese government recently placed technology transfer as one of the key parts of its economic agenda, and we are seeing a growing appetite for university research by companies adopting Open Innovation methodologies to solve internal challenges.

My hope is that technology transfer offices will be benchmarked far less on revenue generated and much more on the amount of research they manage to bring to the world for societal benefit. There has been a historical focus on making money from university research, which is valid because when you commercialise innovative ideas and concepts it benefits society and the economy. On the flip side, a lot of amazing science and technology is being held onto as a result of patent rights obtained by universities, and more often than not the patented subject matter is produced by publicly funded research. I’d like to see a more nuanced system for patents relating to university research where they’re able to have the rights to maintain an element of commercial exploitation but also an incentive to share the knowledge earlier.

What made you leave you previous job and launch your own company? Are there any skills from your background that can translate to skills needed in starting up a business?

Tough question. My academic background is in law, so I’ve done a law degree and post graduate degree in law and bioscience, so I have an academic background related to this sector. My professional background is in multimedia publishing, so it fits quite nicely. My co-founder and good friend Robin is a scientist and he was previously a postdoc at King’s College London, so we bring a nice mix of skills to the business.

I had become a little disillusioned of working in publishing in London and was keen to do a Masters. At the same time, my co-founder and I had the initial idea for IN-PART so the time during my masters enabled me to knock on a few doors around the university and ask questions about whether our idea was a good one while I was studying.

Where did you and your co-founder meet?

We met at school and have been friends since we were around 15. We were both working close by at London Bridge when we got to chatting about the concept for IN-PART.

Do you have one favorite project/contract that you’ve worked on?

IN-PART! I’ve really enjoyed everything from using huge pieces of paper to draw out the web design and user interface, to the new products, software and algorithms we’re developing now. We also have a really exciting, smart and developing team, so watching ourselves and our team grow into this exciting sector has been a highly rewarding experience!

We’ve had a few watershed moments though when the likes of Cambridge, MIT and Columbia came on board to use our system! We thought we must be doing something right.

Why is the collaboration process between universities and industry important?

We believe that university research shouldn’t be dictated by industry as that will only ever lead to incremental change. The step-change innovations are generally produced by allowing academic freedom and we aim to allow them a route to the right industry contacts when they have a new innovation. What companies need to be more aware of is the amount they could (or should!) be utilising the knowledge within universities. Our aim is also to educate so that when companies do have a problem and require an innovative step to overcome it their first port of call is a university to provide a solution to it.

That’s why the second product we’ve just finished Beta testing allows companies to define an innovative solution that they require and find solutions in universities to solve it; not just from the leading academic in that area, but the most commercially minded academic internationally to suit their needs. The Beta test we ran over the last two months has been overwhelmingly positive so we’re really excited about growing this into our current suite of products.

What does the future have in store for IN-PART?

As mentioned, we’ve just finished Beta testing a new product for companies using our system and have completed our first sales. We’re also continuing to internationalise – especially in America – taking advantage of our initial clients at MIT, Columbia, Stanford, UPenn, UCSB and 15 or so others.

Like anyone at our stage as well, we’re also looking to find, hire and retain the right people to grow the team, and generally just get better at everything we do!

If you would like to find out more about IN-PART and what they could do for you, visit their website. Patrick tweets @JPSpeedie.

The post #FoundersFriday with Patrick Speedie from IN-PART appeared first on Digital Science.