By: MAUREEN MENGEL
Happy New Year, Forbes readers! For this first column of 2019, I decided to do something a bit different to the articles that I typically write.
Last night, I attended a presentation in Rome (which is where I’m based half of the time), hosted by LUISS university and Confindustria Young Entrepreneurs , by esteemed MIT professor Robert Langer. For those of you who, like myself until a short while ago, had never heard of Professor Langer, he runs the largest biomedical engineering lab in the world, holds the world record for number of patents (over 1350 between those granted and pending) and is the among the 7 most cited individuals in history.
You may be wondering why I’m writing about a chemical engineer in a PropTech column. The reason is this. In the course of his career spanning over four decades, Professor Langer has founded over 40 startups in his field, only one of which is no longer operational. Of the majority that survived, several have been very successful, with record breaking IPOs and multi billion dollar industry exits. The title of his presentation was “what I’ve learned from founding more than 40 startups”, so I decided to see how (if!) these lessons from biotech can translate to PropTech.
IMAGE DISTRIBUTED FOR THE QUEEN ELIZABETH PRIZE FOR ENGINEERING – In this image released on Monday, Oct. 26, 2015, Dr Robert Langer of MIT, who was announced as the 2015 Winner of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QEPrize). The QEPrize today released the inaugural Create the Future Report, an international survey of attitudes towards engineering surveying respondents in global centres for engineering including the US, Germany, Japan, Turkey, India and Brazil. The report shows that an overwhelming majority of the public in each of the 10 countries surveyed agree that engineering has driven progress in society in the past and will do so in future. To mark the occasion business leaders will meet at a luncheon hosted by the Lord Mayor and the City of London Corporation at Mansion House to honour the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and 2015 winner Dr Robert Langer. Press release available at http://goo.gl/4Rbtzc. (Jason Alden/Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering via AP Images)AP Images for Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
Professor Langer gave us several “science lessons” for a nascent biotech startup. I’m going to try to formulate the PropTech equivalent for the ones I think our sector’s startups can learn from.
Read more >> https://maureenmengel.wordpress.com/2019/01/10/the-7-lessons-that-proptech-startups-can-learn-from-biotech/
