Our Team

We are a group of aspiring knowledge brokers passionate about bridging the gap between Science and Business.

The Inspiration

The BizBricks idea was inspired by the 2012 University of Waterloo iGEM team. The Human Practices team came forth with concepts and solutions that demonstrated the need of tying revolutionary ideas emerging within synthetic biology to traditional business tools that would support the field’s growth and sustainability. For the past three years, the University of Waterloo iGEM team has been comprised of students who come from multidisciplinary programs, including Biotechnology & Economics, Science and Business (with specializations in various scientific fields), and Arts and Business. These programs have given students the ability to build very versatile mindsets that allowed us to achieve the design of a portal that conveys customizability for the synthetic biology community.

Sharing Knowledge

Encouraging individuals to share their findings and achieve a diverse exchange of information.

Stakeholder Engagement

Engaging synthetic biology stakeholders at all aspects of the business and technology development process.

Growth & Sustainability

Introducing tools and concepts that will allow synthetic biologists build long-term solutions.

BizBricks Portal Competitive Analysis

Before launching any business, it is important that the entrepreneur understands its competition. Indeed an entrepreneur seeks to fill a market gap by offering a product whose value addition is greater than what is already being proposed in the market for his target market. Hence, to clearly know just what their value proposition will be, an entrepreneur must understand those of his competitors.

In this portion of the business plan, we will analyse the competition faced by the proposed BizBricks portal. To do this effectively, we will map out the attributes that characterize portal as well as others and compare them in a Competitor Matrix. In order to appreciate the value proposition presented by the BizBricks portal, it is essential to juxtapose it against existing comparable but not completely similar sites. The advantages of this matrix are evident from its presentation: the traits are easily comparable and several competitors can be compared at once.

The BizBricks portal was compared to other learning portals freely available online. Due to the pioneering nature of the BizBricks portal in the synthetic biology industry, the portals in this matrix were not necessarily intended for synthetic biology but their end goal was similar to that of BizBricks: to educate the end user through freely available and at times open-sourced content.

Traits in the competitor matrix to be analysed:
- Open Sourced
- Availability at no cost
- Intuitive
- Interactive
- Friendly User Interface
- Customized for Synthetic Biology
- Aspect of Affiliation to IGEM
- Contribution of Best Practices
- Aspect of Networking

As seen from the competitor matrix above, the BizBricks portal, despite having a seemingly niche market, caters for its users in all aspects that would have been provided to them in several different places. Making a quick analysis of the competitor matrix, the portal is the only one that is open sourced and hence allows for input from several knowledge sources of different backgrounds. There is thus large potential for providing novel insight in an industry still in its formative stages and doesn’t have the luxury of lots of published and easily available literature.

This competitor matrix indicates the capabilities of the competition. One drawback is that in such a niche industry and a pioneering portal it is very difficult to find a direct competitor. Without a direct competitor it is difficult to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the competition in direct relation to BizBricks. For example, MARSDD.com is a very good resource for entrepreneurs with extensive details on every aspect of how to start your own business. However due to the fact that it is not open sourced and is a broad-spectrum tool for all sorts of businesses it is difficult to assess challenges that BizBricks will face in it’s growth as a portal.

It is hence very easy to conclude that BizBricks has no direct competition. However, it would be foolhardy to assume that the rest of the synthetic biology entrepreneurs are not consulting online tools in their entrepreneurship adventure. Hence, in place of these tools, BizBricks offers an informative, valid and practical tool in one place.

Other competitors to add
Coursera
Wikipedia
Community Bricks
http://pivot.cos.com/- Pivot- Community of Science

Attributions

Content goes here.