Comments during the 3rd Presentation:

Perhaps we should have two canvas: short term one and long term one.

@3D http://www.stemcell.com/ – a Vancouver “service provider” to industry. Have you considered providing a “service”?

@3d I have a contact at Abbott pharmaceuticals if you’re interested. my email: bpeterson@lululemon.com

3d printer service bureau. Fabrication in France and US: http://www.sculpteo.com/en

Notes from the 3rd workshop:

Customer Discovery – accept that your initial view of the world was wrong! So need to sketch, test and explain to others then learn, pivot

Customer Validation is next! Repeatable! Focus! Build Scale!

Consider the difference between the official org chart and the real one that you need to find!

Map the org chart and roles, colour coding to categorize, try and characterize other similar orgs. Be able to explain it –> sales map

How does customer view of the world look? Where do you fit? What is balance of power for negotiation? Time, effort, $%

Selling is different in new categories and at different stages: check “Selling the Wheel” 2001 but good points http://bit.ly/XK302B

Your sales model & customer relationship plan will be different from anyone else – but there are common patterns to look for.

need to shock or disrupt the conventional expectations otherwise you risk becoming part of the “wallpaper” of industry norms

I think LLL may have the opposite of “don’t be an a-hole” problem – the over-comfortable “love-in” with loyalists.

Key Q for LLL” are you targeting LLL loyalists” to cross-sell a new product OR non-LLL buyers in a new category?

We had two excellent interview/meetings today.

First Interview:

We talked to a professor in the life sciences who was very enthusiastic to collaborate with us (he was very pleased to learn that we were not trying to sell him something). He works with heart muscle cells and identified a great need for creating active muscle tissue constructs and had some clear ideas about how our technology could be possibly used to do this. Interestingly, 3D printing may be the only way of doing this as heart muscle cells de-activate when cultured in 2D.

Second Interview:

We talked to a professor in the Physiological Sciences who was also very enthusiastic to collaborate with us. He identified some very interesting and realistic applications for vasculature researches and high throughput screening of bioactive components that would not only showcase the unique technological advantages of our system (ie. no other available system could do it) and is achievable at our current stage of development. He is also the science director of a drug research agency and offered to set up a brain storming session with other professors and drug researchers to help identify potential applications of our technology in drug development.  Awesome!

We will have another interview/meeting with a professor from BRONCH group in the Saint Pail’s Hospital tomorrow.

Not a very eventful day in itself, but we scheduled two meetings with UBC professors for Wednesay, and one meeting for Thursday.

Discussed project with a professor in engineering:

• She felt that it is very important to validate the technology first, rather than follow a community validation model, as people would not likely risk any amount of money on a tool that isn’t guaranteed to perform a certain function. Even re-creating an existing model may be enough to convince people.
• Emphasized finding one great application as a launching point – something that only 3D printing can do, or something that is made considerably easier by 3D printing. Of course, the application in question will only come to light by talking to more people!

Interviewed a UBC professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering. He comes more from the technology creation side than from the technology use side, but had some helpful comments. First, he was very aware of 3D cell cultures and tissues, and said he has seen or heard of other people doing similar things. It seems there is a lot of interest in this area, so IP differentiation is going to be all the more important moving forward. Though he could not see many immediate uses in his own work for 3D cell constructs, he suggested several other highly relevant groups to talk to:

• CCRM – Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine
• Stem Cell Technologies
• Researchers/organizations working on personalized medicine, regenerative medicine, and biomaterials

In terms of the interview itself, we need to be a little better at being “status down”, but it was still a positive interview.

– Since last night, we have received five positive response to the meeting request. We tried two new things this week that seems worked better:

• Attaching a (one page) pdf file providing an image of our system, and some capabilities
• Sending the emails after working hours!

– Eoin from the Axon group connected us to someone in Life Science BC. Thanks Eoin!

– Added graduate students/researchers/post-docs to our contact list. These people won’t be buying the system, but are likely end users and an important part of the work flow. They may be best suited to explain “pains”, experimental procedures, and help us understand how our printer could fit into their process.