A Career Development and Entrepreneurship Workshop

Self-Assessment

Your Career Steps
This site provided by the Stanford University Career Development Center includes exercises and tips to help you move through the career process. After completing the steps, you will end up with a list of your career interests and specific goals to help you explore and/or pursue those interests.

Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI)
This personality type theory is based on the idea that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent, being due to basic differences in the ways individuals prefer to use their perception and judgment. Knowing your personality type, as measured through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument, may help you with career planning.

National Postdoctoral Association Core Competencies Toolkit
The U.S. National Postdoctoral Association (NPA) has established six core competencies to offer guidance to individual postdoctoral scholars who must seek out relevant training experiences, in collaboration with mentors, institutions, and other advisors who provide this training. "Competency" has been defined as "an acquired personal skill that is demonstrated in [one's] ability to provide a consistently adequate or high level of performance in a specific job function." These competencies are meant to serve primarily as: (1) a basis for self-evaluation by postdoctoral scholars and (2) a basis for developing training opportunities that can be evaluated by mentors, institutions, and other advisors.

Science Alliance
Complementing the New York Academy of Sciences's innovative and dynamic scientific programs, the Science Alliance provides programs and services focused on career education, development and training. Through live events, webinars, and a dedicated website and forum, Science Alliance provides unparalleled opportunities to learn and network with individuals across institutions and disciplines. It serves over 4000 young scientists and the larger Academy membership.

SciPhD
The course is designed to help you asses your current skills and express them in business-friendly language. Furthermore, the SciPhD course will help you see where gaps in your skills could be preventing you from realizing the career of your dreams. With this knowledge you will know exactly the kinds of continuing education or coaching you should seek in order to be competitive.

Strong Interest Inventory — various websites
The Strong Interest Inventory is designed to give students and people in transition insight into their interests, preferences, and personal styles. It compares the test taker's results with those of people like them who have already found satisfying careers. It also generates a list of the top 10 occupations the individual is most likely to find rewarding.

Career Exploration

Websites

Bio Careers
Bio Careers is a career service dedicated to expanding professional options for life sciences PhDs and MDs. The service provides online career resources and job postings.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn operates the world's largest professional network on the Internet with 161 million members in over 200 countries and territories.

Books and Articles

AAAS/Science Business Office. Career Trends: Careers Away from the Bench. Advice and Options for Scientists.

Fiske P. Putting Your Degree to Work: Practical Career Strategies for Scientists.

Freedman T. Career Opportunities in Biotechnology and Drug Development. 1st ed. Cold Spring Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 2009.

Fuhrmann CN et al. Improving graduate education to support a branching career pipeline: Recommendations based on a survey of doctoral students in the basic biomedical sciences. CBE Life Sci. Educ. 2011;10(3):239-49.

Newhouse M. Outside the Ivory Tower: A Guide for Academics Considering Alternative Careers. Cambridge, Harvard University Office of Career; 1993.

Robbins-Roth C. Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower. 1st ed. Waltham, Academic Press; 1998.

Rubio M, Hooley T. Recruiting researchers: Survey of employer practice 2009. Vitae, The Careers Research and Advisory Centre (CRAC) Limited.

Entrepreneurship

Websites

Bioentrepreneur: From Bench to Boardroom
Nature Biotechnology's portal dedicated to scientists interested in commercializing their research.

Business Model Generation
Business Model Generation is a digital Canvas that can be used to generate a business model.

Ecorner: Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner
Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner offers 2000 free videos and podcasts, featuring entrepreneurship and innovation thought leaders.

Books and Journal Articles

Byers T, Dorf R, Nelson A. Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise. 3rd ed. New York, McGraw-Hill; 2010.

Mehta S. Commercializing Successful Biomedical Technologies: Basic Principles for the Development of Drugs, Diagnostics and Devices. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; 2008.

Mullins J. The New Business Road Test: What Entrepreneurs and Executives Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan. 2nd ed. Harlow, Pearson Education Limited; 2006.

Pavese KE, Hayter C, Satinsky DM, et al. Yaroslavl Roadmap 10-15-20.

Pressman L, Guterman SK, Abrams I, et al. Pre-production investment and jobs induced by MIT exclusive patent licenses: a preliminary model to measure the economic impact of university licensing. J Assn Univ Tech Managers 1995; Vol VII.

Sponsors

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It's a bad time to be a young scientist. Governments are slashing long-term research budgets to cover short-term financial needs, a single tenure-track academic job opening receives hundreds of applicants, and the overwhelming majority of grant applications will never get funded.

It's a great time to be a young scientist. New technologies and techniques have opened previously unimaginable lines of research, a global population of nearly seven billion people is clamoring for solutions to huge social and environmental problems, and a globally-connected business community is generating new companies and opportunities at an unprecedented pace.

On June 6–7, 2012 both of these views were on full display in Moscow, where the New York Academy of Sciences and the Skolkovo Foundation co-hosted a career development workshop for young Russian scientists. The meeting drew an enthusiastic crowd of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-stage academic faculty, all trying to navigate the complex career landscape of a country still reinventing itself after decades of centrally-planned Soviet administration.

Randy Ribaudo and Larry Petcovic of Human Workflows LLC and SciPhD Training Programs conducted the first day's workshop, which focused on finding a job in the corporate world. Ribaudo and Petcovic collaborate with the New York Academy of Sciences' Science Alliance program to offer business and job skill preparation for scientists. These programs are important because scientists who have spent much of their adult life in academic training often find corporate culture confusing, even in companies with a heavy emphasis on research.

Even in the U.S. and Europe, government and academic research labs comprise a minority of the job market; most PhD-trained scientists will end up working in the private sector. Contrary to what many academics believe, though, corporate research is not all dull and repetitive. Ribaudo cited several major breakthroughs in biomedical science that have come from industry labs, and many successful scientists rise into corporate management as well.

To get those jobs, academically trained scientists need to understand the language of private industry, and Ribaudo and Petcovic provided a primer on it. Businesses are looking for researchers who have technical qualifications, but who also understand business concepts such as strategic thinking, project management, and finance. Fortunately, many PhDs have developed those skills during their years in the lab. Through a series of exercises and discussions, Ribaudo and Petcovic explained how to evaluate and express those abilities in terms business people will understand.

A panel session at the end of the first day featured three researchers who have succeeded in business in Russia. The panelists gave a realistic, often blunt assessment of the best career options for the country's young scientists.

Monica Kerr, Director of Science Alliance, the Academy's science career development program, led the second day's session, which focused on entrepreneurship. Even researchers who plan to work for a big company may find themselves developing and commercializing new products, so entrepreneurial skills are essential for everyone in industry. For those planning to start their own companies, Kerr explained the risks and benefits of that career path and how to assess one's entrepreneurial qualifications. A series of small-group exercises illustrated how entrepreneurs should think about exploiting new opportunities.

Several factors have made the U.S. a leader in entrepreneurship, including a strong emphasis on financial success, official encouragement for new companies, and a culture in which failure is considered acceptable. Two successful Russian businessmen from the technology industry underscored those points, and answered attendees' questions about starting companies in Russia.

The highly interactive meeting also featured two evening networking sessions and discussions over lunch each day. At the close of the conference, young Russian scientists still faced formidable obstacles, but attendees now had a set of practical tools with which to overcome them.

Speakers:
Ellis Rubinstein, The New York Academy of Sciences
Randall Ribaudo, Human Workflows; SciPhD Training Programs
Larry Petcovic, Human Workflows; SciPhD Training Programs

Highlights

• Private industry offers exciting opportunities for young scientists.
• Researchers need to develop short- and long-term career plans to guide their job searches.
• Scientists need to build a "personal brand" and sell it in their business resumes.

Misconceptions about scientists in academia and industry

Ellis Rubinstein, President and Chief Executive Officer of the New York Academy of Sciences, started the Career Development and Entrepreneurship Workshop with a brief introduction to the Academy's mission, tracing its long history of openness and international collaboration. In recent years, Rubinstein has led an effort to build on that tradition with meetings aimed at young scientists from different institutions. This workshop was part of that initiative.

Randy Ribaudo, President and Chief Executive Officer of Human Workflows and Co-Founder of SciPhD Training Programs, then introduced the first day's main session, which focused on getting a job in private industry. Ribaudo began by noting some of the differences between scientists in academic labs and those in industry, based on his own company's interviews with them. "The basic difference was that scientists in academia tended to debate and argue and defend their own beliefs, and ... in industry it was a much more collaborative kind of an attitude of working in teams and that sort of thing," he said.

While working in industry involves a great deal of collaboration and teamwork, getting a job is still a competitive process, and Ribaudo described several strategies scientists can use to gain an edge in the corporate hiring process. That has become even more important in recent years, as surveys have shown that a majority of new PhDs will ultimately end up working in private businesses rather than in academic or government labs.

Unfortunately, academic scientists still harbor old biases about corporate research, often regarding it as the "dark side" of science. "Sometimes you will find that your mentors, the people who run your laboratory, will criticize you if they find out that you want to leave academia and go to industry," said Ribaudo.

That negative perception of the corporate world has spawned several common myths: that industry research is boring, that scientists in corporate labs cannot publish their results, and that academically-trained PhDs are overqualified for work in business. Through a series of examples, Ribaudo systematically dismantled these myths, showing that modern industrial labs employ numerous academically-trained researchers and conduct exciting, often groundbreaking studies that get published in top journals.

Indeed, scientists who choose to leave academic research have a plethora of options, ranging from laboratory work in large global companies to starting their own businesses or becoming independent consultants. To make intelligent choices, researchers should develop short- and long-term career plans based on their interests. The plans should include identifying the new skills needed to advance through a career, and clear strategies for learning those skills.

The importance of soft skills

To most scientists, "skill" means the ability to perform particular laboratory techniques and research methods. While many research-focused companies will expect new lab workers to have those types of abilities, they also need employees to have "soft skills," such as good judgment, communication, teamwork, and the ability to get things done. In industry surveys, managers say that academically-trained scientists are most likely to have the technical skills, but not the soft skills necessary to work in business. "You've got to do something to convince industry that they're wrong about this," said Ribaudo.

That may not be as hard as it sounds. Ribaudo described several things academic scientists can do to build a "personal brand," combining aspects of their scientific, business, and social identities to demonstrate the skills industry wants. For example, conducting a series of experiments and publishing the results is the essence of a basic researcher's scientific identity, but that process also requires persistence, planning, and often teamwork and delegation—traits that demonstrate a strong business identity.

Larry Petcovic, Vice President for Communications at Human Workflow and Co-Founder of SciPhD Training Programs, explained that big companies often use a systematic approach to score executives' strengths and weaknesses in a variety of areas, and he and Ribaudo have adapted that process for scientists trying to move into industry. Looking more deeply into the concept of a personal brand, Petcovic and Ribaudo described six categories of skills that correlate with success in entry-level positions in industry. Job-seekers need to understand which of those skills they already have and how to communicate those talents to prospective employers.

Employers are looking for competency in these 24 skills. (Image courtesy of Randall Ribaudo)

The six categories are strategic vision, developing people, executing plans, achieving results, communication, and financial acumen. Individual skills within each category provide a more detailed description of the requirements. For example, communication includes technical literacy, style flexibility, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. Though these don not sound like traditional strong points of highly trained scientists, Petcovic and Ribaudo argued that most researchers are simply unaccustomed to expressing their abilities this way. For instance, explaining a project to a friend or colleague requires all of the skills in the communication category.

The morning session ended with an exercise in which attendees worked in small groups, identifying how various skills they have developed in academic research fit into one of the six categories. A representative from each group then presented the results.

Speakers:
Larry Petcovic, Human Workflows; SciPhD Training Programs
Randall Ribaudo, Human Workflows; SciPhD Training Programs

Panelists:
Oleg Alekseev, Skolkovo Foundation
Alexander Kuleshov, A. Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems
Dmitry Peskov, Agency for Strategic Initiatives

Highlights

• When applying for a job, candidates must address the business skill requirements described in a job advertizement advertisement.
• Networking is a crucial skill for job-seekers.
• The career development process in Russia has changed dramatically in recent years.
• Working for a Russian state company may be poor career choice, but some private business sectors are likely to grow dramatically.

How to develop a detailed job-search strategy

The second half of the day focused on developing a detailed job-hunting strategy. Petcovic and Ribaudo began this session by discussing the self-assessment process, which entails figuring out one's aptitude at each of the 24 skills presented in the first session. To simplify that process, all of the conference attendees received passwords to Petcovic and Ribaudo's online self-assessment web site, which guides job-seekers through a series of structured exercises to determine their qualifications.

Once scientists have developed a good idea of their own abilities, they can read job listings with a more critical eye. Ribaudo showed a typical advertisement for an industry research position, highlighting two distinct types of qualifications. Most scientists immediately notice the technical qualifications in a job listing, such as experience in immunology and molecular biology, but few realize that the advertisement also contains a list of business skills the company is looking for. Identifying those skills can put applicants ahead of their competition.

"It's hard to imagine that you are going to be so much better than all those other PhDs with regard to your molecular biology skills," said Ribaudo, adding that "the advantage that you can have is that most of them ... are going to talk only about their technical skills."

It is important to focus on the business skills (highlighted in yellow) outlined in a job advertisement as well as the technical skills (highlighted in orange). (Image courtesy of Randall Ribaudo)

Many researchers also misunderstand how companies handle resumes. Unlike an academic curriculum vitae, a resume should be no more than two pages long, and its sole purpose is to land an interview, not a job. Once in the interview, the applicant can convince the company to hire them. Indeed, most resumes are not even read by people initially. Because they receive so many applications for each position, companies generally process resumes by computer, using algorithms that identify the applicants who have mentioned the same skills that were in the job listing. A generic resume will probably lack those specific keywords, so applicants should customize it. Looking at the sample job listing, Ribaudo explained how a typical molecular immunologist could map specific competencies from his or her own self-assessment, correlating them with the specific terms in the listing. Armed with that map, the applicant can then structure a resume with the appropriate keywords.

After the initial resume screening, a company will send the top resumes to the executives and team members who will interview applicants for the position. Most of these people will read the resumes quickly right before the interview. Ribaudo offered several tips on organizing a resume to put the important information where it is most likely to be noticed. "In your resume you're building your brand ... covering all the things that are most important to that company for that job you're going after," said Ribaudo.

Even the best resume will not get very far, though, if it doesn't reach the right person. In industry, the majority of new hires come from referrals, either by someone who already works at the company or someone who has done business with them. Applicants who know more of the right people stand a much better chance of getting such referrals, so Ribaudo and Petcovic offered a list of strategies for professional networking. Joining local business organizations, using online networking sites such as LinkedIn, and seeking out industry presenters at scientific conferences can all lead to good results later.

Once the interview comes, job-seekers have to be ready for it. Ribaudo advocates doing as much research as possible on the company's business, competitors, recent developments or setbacks, and people. Applicants also need to be ready for some standard questions, such as what their greatest weakness is, and why the company should hire them rather than any of the other applicants.

After the lectures, attendees broke into two teams to play a game that involved passing different objects from one person to the next. Each team was free to develop its own strategy to pass the objects most efficiently. Without any formal management training, the teams demonstrated most of the business competencies Petcovic and Ribaudo had outlined during their presentations, showing that they possess these skills even if they did not realize it.

The job market in Russia

The day's final session featured a panel of three successful Russian businessmen who answered questions about job opportunities in the country. This discussion ranged across a variety of topics, from job-seeking and entrepreneurship to Russia's unique economic and business challenges.

Alexander Kuleshov, Director of the A. Kharkevich Institute for Information Transmission Problems, described an individual career as a business plan: one can benefit by increasing either capitalization, in the form of skills that are valuable on the labor market, or dividends, in the form of a salary. Finding a suitable job entails looking at the new skills it will teach and the salary it will pay, and deciding whether it offers a good value.

Dmitry Peskov, Director of the Young Professionals Department of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives, explained that not all skills are good capital investments. Many Russian companies consider a PhD a negative factor, for example, preferring to hire people with more practical business experience. An oversupply of PhDs feeds that trend.

Oleg Alekseev, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Education and Research, Skolkovo Foundation, stressed that the career development process in Russia has changed dramatically in recent years. In the early 1990s, the chaos that followed the Soviet Union's collapse left thousands of defense industry specialists out of work. Many of those engineers and scientists moved into local government positions, with mixed results.

The panelists universally agreed that working for one of Russia's state-owned companies is a bad idea. Replying to a young chemist who wants to work for the space industry, Kuleshov recommended either switching fields or leaving the country. Alekseev, however, suggested staying in Russia and joining the Skolkovo Open University's space cluster, which is trying to jump-start a new space industry in Moscow.

Though science advocates in other countries often fret over the "brain drain" of talented young researchers leaving for the U.S. and Europe, the panelists at this meeting took a realistic approach. When asked what the current generation of young scientists should do to help the country, Alekseev replied that this is a problem only the meeting's youthful audience could address and suggested that it may involve leaving the country to obtain skills elsewhere. Nonetheless, Peskov pointed to some bright spots where new Russian industries are likely to arise, including biotechnology, materials science, and nanotechnology.

Speaker:
Monica Kerr, New York Academy of Sciences

Highlights

• Even researchers who plan to take academic posts or go to a big company should understand entrepreneurship.
• Scientific research provides good training for entrepreneurship, but researchers also need to add a few skills to succeed in business.
• Entrepreneur-friendly areas don't stigmatize failure.

Introduction to entrepreneurship

Monica Kerr, Director of the Academy's Science Alliance Program, led the discussion for most of the meeting's second day, focusing on entrepreneurship. Traditionally, an "entrepreneur" was someone who started a new company, but Kerr explained that the term's meaning has broadened in recent years. Modern entrepreneurship can also entail restructuring companies, spinning out new companies from existing ventures, or taking innovative new approaches within a large, established corporation.

Big technology and research-driven companies are especially keen to encourage entrepreneurial ventures, lest they get overtaken by smaller competitors. "A lot of innovations tend to come from smaller companies that are more nimble and agile," said Kerr, but "often in a larger organization they'll have a group within them that is allowed to innovate and encouraged to take risks." Regardless of what types of organizations scientists decide to work for, they will probably be expected to be innovators.

Science is inherently innovative, and academic life provides good preparation for corporate entrepreneurship. "Somebody who's running their own lab ... you're kind of running your own business, you're managing the lab, you're managing people, you're writing grants, getting resources you need," said Kerr, adding that "scientists and academics are naturally suited to be entrepreneurs."

After the initial presentation, Kerr directed attendees to break into small groups and discuss entrepreneurial activities they have engaged in during their academic careers. Volunteers then described some of those activities, which ranged from organizing a large concert on campus to starting a new student newspaper.

The students' entrepreneurial spirit is not surprising; according to a recent report the Academy helped prepare, Russia has many talented entrepreneurial people, but lacks an established culture of entrepreneurship to support them in developing new ventures. Creating such a culture could have a huge impact: an analysis of U.S. companies spun off from academic institutions revealed that these companies have created 280,000 jobs and $33.5 billion in new economic activity.

As an example of an entrepreneurial culture, Kerr pointed to the well-studied business ecosystem of Silicon Valley in California. The area has several important features, including research institutions, an established infrastructure for new companies, a business-friendly legal environment, and a good quality of life that attracts qualified people. Social and business networks in the area are multidisciplinary, collaborative, and globally connected, and the culture is diverse and democratized.

Silicon Valley has several social and infrastructural characteristics that promote entrepreneurship. (Image courtesy of Monica Kerr)

Another crucial feature of entrepreneur-friendly areas is that failure is socially acceptable. "Being an entrepreneur, starting your own company is very risky, and a lot of times you are going to fail ... you need an environment and a culture that embraces that," said Kerr.

Researchers who study business innovation often describe entrepreneurial cultures in terms of three overlapping circles of influence: stakes, players, and code. In Silicon Valley, the stakes are money, time, talent, technology, and customer relationships, and players include the venture capital firms, "angel" investors, law firms, and government agencies that provide resources for new companies. Both of these circles are relatively easy to identify. The third circle, code, is more nebulous: it refers to the unwritten rules and traditions by which people actually do business in that area.

"You need to learn what the code is in your local ecosystem and within your industry in order to really gain ability and trust," said Kerr. Unfortunately, the social code of the local business community isn't always obvious. To learn it, entrepreneurs need to figure out who the major players are in the area and talk to them about how to pursue a new venture. That requires networking, a skill that young scientists will find useful no matter what career path they choose.

How to evaluate a business opportunity

After defining the basic concepts of entrepreneurship, Kerr led the group through a series of exercises and discussions that mimicked the process of developing a new business venture. The first exercise was deceptively simple: working in small groups, attendees had to develop a list of alternative uses for a paper clip.

Kerr then walked through the approach entrepreneurs might use to determine which of those ideas constituted a genuine business opportunity. "There are lots of cool technologies and inventions that people come up with, but do they actually really meet a pressing need? Is it something that people really want and will buy?" asked Kerr. Indeed, only about 6% of inventions ever become commercially viable products.

Specifically, a good business opportunity involves a timely, important problem that is not only solvable, but profitable to solve within a favorable social context. Entrepreneurs can achieve that combination of factors in one of two ways: pulling or pushing. "Pull" innovations involve finding solutions to well-defined problems, a strategy common to the pharmaceutical industry. "Push" innovations are solutions in search of problems, a pattern that occurs in many technology businesses.

Within each of those categories, a new idea can be either incremental or disruptive. Incremental opportunities tend to occur in highly competitive industries, where increasing efficiency just a little bit can provide a substantial edge over competitors; robotic assembly lines evolved from manual assembly lines by an incremental process. In contrast, disruptive opportunities change an entire industry very quickly, the way digital photography destroyed the market for film and replaced it with an entirely new set of opportunities.

Starting a new venture, either alone or within the context of a new company, is complex and risky. Business researchers have developed numerous models to make the startup process easier to understand. Kerr presented several of these models, ranging from relatively simple ones that follow the distinct phases of business development, to more complex models that map the domains of a business opportunity into multiple microeconomic and macroeconomic categories. All the models encourage entrepreneurs to evaluate a wide range of variables before deciding to pursue an opportunity. For scientists, it is especially important to avoid being distracted by the details of a particular finding or technology. No matter how interesting the underlying science is, if the market will not pay a profitable price for it, the business will fail.

Next, Kerr illustrated the characteristics of new technological and scientific opportunities with two case studies: the Internet search service Yahoo! and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. Founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1995, when the World Wide Web was in its early stages, Yahoo! clearly met the criteria of a good business opportunity. Crucially, the company's founders focused on more than just the underlying technology of their Web search system. "The vision wasn't just creating new software or a new Internet-type company, the vision was really to help people easily get access to information," said Kerr. Sirtris arose in similar circumstances: it built on new technologies and scientific findings, but its trajectory highlights the unique risks of the life science industry. The company developed small molecules that activate a class of proteins called sirtuins, or histone deacetylases. Preliminary research had suggested that activating these proteins might reverse some of the effects of aging. Though the idea was timely, important, and potentially very profitable, Sirtris faced enormous uncertainty about whether the technology would actually work. Nonetheless, the company successfully developed it to the point that a larger pharmaceutical firm later acquired Sirtris, so at least some experts in the industry thought the company's idea looked like a good opportunity.

At the end of this session, Kerr told attendees to return to their paper clip brainstorming exercise to evaluate their ideas and pick the best business opportunity.

Speaker:
Monica Kerr, The New York Academy of Sciences

Panelists:
Gaidar Magdanurov, Microsoft Seed Fund
Albert Yefimov, Skolkovo IT Cluster

Highlights

• Entrepreneurs need to evaluate opportunities carefully and develop workable business models.
• Starting a new venture in Russia can be challenging, but also rewarding.

What is a business model?

After finding a good business opportunity, an entrepreneur needs to develop a business model. The business model is a simple explanation of how the company will create, deliver, and capture value—in other words, how it will make money. A good business model should fit on a single slide or sheet of paper and be easy for potential investors to understand.

Though it should be conceptually simple, the business model needs to address several elements, including who the customers are, what the business offers them, how the product or service gets to them, and all of the requirements and dependencies for running the operation and making profits. Free online tools can help new entrepreneurs generate an initial business plan.

A business model must consider all the elements that make up a successful enterprise. (Image courtesy of Monica Kerr)

Returning to the Yahoo! example, Kerr explained that the company's original business model was very straightforward. Yahoo! users would get easy access to the growing amount of information available online, in exchange for seeing display advertisements that would bring in revenue. "That's a very simple snapshot of what they were thinking their business model would be back in 1995 when they were just getting started," said Kerr.

Attendees then presented their own business models based on the paper clip exercise. The groups' ideas ranged from practical inventions, such as a paper clip that doubled as a thumbtack and magnet, to more speculative opportunities that included a box of self-assembling clips that could create any desired object.

Kerr finished the workshop by summarizing the strategies entrepreneurs can use to get funding for their ideas. Initial startup companies often need little more than loans from family and friends, but later development stages usually require "series A" funding from venture capitalists and other private investors, followed by additional rounds of fundraising leading up to a public stock offering.

As an epilogue, Kerr described the subsequent developments at Yahoo! and Sirtris. The former eventually became one of the dominant players in Internet search, though it has recently had difficulty competing with Google and Microsoft. After GlaxoSmithKline acquired Sirtris for $720 million, the large pharmaceutical company had trouble replicating earlier results with sirtuin inhibitors, and investors have since soured on the technology. Neither failure is likely to harm the original entrepreneurs' prospects.

Failure is an option

Albert Yefimov, Director of Skolkovo IT Cluster Projects, and Gaidar Magdanurov, Managing Director of Microsoft Seed Fund, conducted the meeting's final panel discussion, beginning by picking up the theme of failure. Both speakers stressed that failure in business is nothing to be ashamed of; indeed, examples from Thomas Edison to the computer gaming company Zinga show that failure is an integral part of success in entrepreneurship. Some businesses simply won't survive. The key, according to both speakers, is to keep trying.

After brief introductory presentations, the two speakers took questions from the audience. In response to a question about choosing a career path, Yefimov explained that big corporations offer security and a well-defined route to promotion, while startup companies do not; however, the greater risks of starting a business balance the greater rewards of eventual success. Magdanurov pointed out that the two career paths are not mutually exclusive; young scientists can try starting their own companies, then take jobs elsewhere if their initial ventures fail. Nor is entrepreneurship limited to small companies. Magdanurov stressed that big corporations encourage innovation as well, and Yefimov said that new projects within a company operate much like startup businesses; however, he cautioned that Russia's state-owned companies are averse to innovation, which tends to lead to corruption in that setting.

The panel also addressed the challenges of getting funding for startup companies, the importance of persistence, and the need to evaluate new opportunities skeptically before deciding to pursue them as businesses. As the meeting closed, attendees left with a realistic assessment of the current business environment in Russia and a solid understanding of the skills and strategies they will need to succeed in their newly launched careers.

Individuals interested in pursuing an entrepreneurial career can avail themselves of a number of resources. (Image courtesy of Monica Kerr)