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14 May 2020: Session 3
Biobandage was really excited to participate in this session 3 of Little Bang. We really wanted to do our best even in quarantine. Biobandage was really excited to participate in the PLASMA 2020 cohort, we met some amazing people and learned how to go beyond our product and learn ways to validate our product and hear from some amazing people which we were able to incorporate in our LittleBang Poster for session 3. Through PLASMA we made lots of connections to people in the health and business industry as well as academics who we normally would not get to meet or talk to. We always are looking for interviews and ways to test our product. We do not want to seem like an ignorant company that is contributing trash to the planet because people do not want our product. We really wanted to make sure we were making something that we believed in and what was missing in the market. We talked to Gurkern Sufi, who was a Davis alumnus and now owns his own company, Ravata Solutions. We also participated in the 1 million cups Sacramento organization who was extremely kind to chat with us for an hour of their morning and give us feedback, support, and connections to various resources. They helped us define our positioning in the market and if we claim the holistic healing path, what the legal implications and claims for us as a company change. Both reached out to our teams after the PLASMA competition. They have offered their resources to help us as a growing company beyond financing but provided quality advice and direction. Eli has attended various leadership workshops. Sabah and Nealah have taken management courses that are offered through GSM and have integrated our course materials into our tactics and strategies as leaders and entrepreneurs. Nadiah’s background in communications helps us put our best foot forward as she presented on behalf of BioBandage. Our team’s interdisciplinary backgrounds allow us to collaborate in different dimensions which adds to our process. We all learn from each other and work effectively. Because of COVID, things have changed, Currently our marker spaces have become our garages and our laptops. We host meetings via Zoom and collaborate over google docs. Participating in LittleBang always makes us excited because we get better every time. We learn and correct ourselves. This time we learned we had to drill in on our business model on the poster and not just in our pitch. This way we can get investor attention on how much money they should get back if they were to invest. We hope to come up with a more thorough and concrete business plan to gain trust of investors and to be able to execute it once our products are finalized. Since we participated in the last rounds, we really wanted to strengthen our brand image and how we want to operate as a business. We took this remote quarter offline to really reflect and see what our users are looking for, need, and if we are doing our part as a leader. We would also like to thank the organizers and judges of LittleBang for putting on such a great event and giving students a platform to share their ideas. 4 Feburary 2020: Session 2
Our business idea consists of creating biodegradable, plastic-free bandages to break into the bioactive wound care market that is expected to grow to $13.5 billion dollars by 2026 and we aim to compete with commercial bandages to be sold to various consumers such as hospitals, people in need of at-home wound care, and schools. We acknowledge that for a product to work in our world and successfully enter a market, it is not sufficient for it to be biodegradable or environmentally friendly-it has to be able to perform at the same level or even better than the product it is replacing and that is our goal for BioBandage. For our poster, we decided to take a step back and refine our branding. In Session 1 we had a comment that our poster seemed more like a science fair experiment, so we decided to clean up the look. We used more icons, used less type, and redesigned our logo/ We chose to use cool tones to match similar brands that are in the health industry. Since the first session, we have included more research and added new statistics that help our project even more. We still have yet to do a better polling process. We want to ask a diverse group of people, but we also want to interview professors and professionals in the field. We hope to get at least ten more interviews from people that are at least 20 minutes long each to get the most information and feedback possible. We want to get connected to more people through professors and ask them if they know anyone that could help further our research. We would want to ask them about how we make our product seem more appealing to all audiences. We would also ask if they know any other product that has a similar goal to us but made out of a different material. We are currently in the UC PLASMA 2020 cohort, which is an accelerator on campus and are working to get advice from people familiar in the business field. So far, they have helped us establish the order of a good pitch and what could make our product better. PLASMA will be very beneficial in these upcoming weeks since we will be able to connect with different mentors each week to help us refine our business model. We plan on attending workshops to learn to talk to customers and potential users. Team members, Nadiah Mohammed and Nealah Lee have already taken Design 166: Human-Centered Design, so they are familiar with what questions to ask people and understand their needs. We want to have at least two people attend a workshop just in case some information is missed. We will take the information to help us compete in Little Bang Session 3. We want to refine our skills as much as possible to help with future funding and talking to potential users. BioBandage was one out of nine teams selected and we are given a $500 in funding for our research. After participating in Little Bang competitions, we realized we have a lot to learn about delivering a successful pitch and how to introduce a product into the market. After participating in Little Bang Session 2, we were able to create a pitch that helped us set a base for PLASMA. Little Bang also helped us come up with better ways to information rather than just using words. For the next competition, we plan on taking advantage of visuals more than words to get the information across easily and quickly. After looking at feedback from Sessions 1 and 2, we plan to refine our pitch more within the next couple of weeks. We also want to refine our poster more and condense it into more images rather than using text. We took advice from the previous attendees and decreased the size of the bandage. We also plan to workout WOW factor to make the audience and judges feel more engaged. Lastly, we need to include better content and presentation quality, since we score mostly 6 across the scoreboard. We plan to work on this within the next couple of weeks with PLASMA. Since our last blog post, we have become more involved with BioBandage and putting more hours into the TEAM lab to continue to refine our prototype. We are grateful for the help of Little Bang! and VentureWell for the BioInnovation awards that have helped up get back into the lab and continue our research and we cannot wait for the future of BioBandage in the bioactive wound care industry. UC Davis Litte Bang! Poster Competition | Session 1 2019
November 21 Our team won both the BioInnovation and Session Prize ! Check out this article we published on our experience doing the competition. |
UC Davis University Honors Program feature
July 31 Our team was featured in the UHP news article! "Staying true to its roots: Supporting cross-disciplinary and hands-on learning in UHP via the BioDesign Challenge". |
BioDesign Challenge 2019| NYC
June 18-24 We competed in the BioDesign Challenge! It was great seeing all the other schools apply what BioDesign means to them and solving real issues in their communities. It was a great event filled with great panels, speakers, and great gallery show. |
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