Entrepreneurship Program and Innovation Community (EPIC) is the entrepreneurial arm of iGEM. EPIC builds a more sustainable bio collective by helping to kickstart the creation of bio-based start-ups through training programmes and networking opportunities with co-founders, mentors, investors and partners[1].

With the idea of industrializing our TPE project, we firstly sign up for Venture Creation Labs (VCL) held by EPIC-China to have a systematic starting guide. VCL program is a virtual event encompassing workshops and networking opportunities with companies and investors, equipping us with the tools, strategies and team we need to realise our ventures.

Through the VCL program, we identified our entrepreneurial goal and learned how to achieve it step by step.

What are market and customer needs? Based on the experimental design of our TPE project, we then try to define our startup’s unique value proposition and target customers. This is our first step to explore beyond biology.

How to change a concept to profitable business? We try to develop our business plans and figure out the best marketing strategy fitting our project. We learned what are required and considered to sale our product to the first customer successfully.

In this week, we also finished the assignment given by EPIC-China to present a case study of startups from iGEM. EPIC-China member Wenxi Li firstly gave us an example by presenting the EPIC story of GINKGO BIOWORKS. We chose Colorifix company to share because of similar dye products.

In the final week, we summarized all what we learned and assembled our business plan draft into a final version. In addition, we learned more about communication with the goal of effective fundraising in this last week: How to present our ideas and concepts with good storytelling to impress investors?