Bioscience entrepreneurship: a promising empowerment pathway for medical laboratory scientists

Abstract

Background: Entrepreneurial abilities help to recognize business opportunities and to combine other factors of production in a way that will create value, meet needs and generate income. Bioscience entrepreneurship involves getting innovative ideas based on scientific concepts, using them to solve problems, meet needs and develop products.

Aim: This discourse aims to shed light on bio-entrepreneurship for scientists and professionals to see boundless opportunities inherent in the convergence of ideas, concepts and technologies from all disciplines of life and biomedical sciences for the creation of value and achievement of wealth through need-meeting innovations.

Methods: Professional knowledge/expertise, intuitive observation and conceptual analysis of biomedical and life sciences innovation were brought to bear, coupled with reviewing relevant literature on bioscience enterprise initiatives in various search engines.

Results: Our findings show that bioentrepreneurship in Asia, Europe and America has been used to create value and meet needs. Such enterprise initiatives have created products and services that earn foreign exchanged for these developed continents. In all climes where outstanding achievements have been recorded with bio-entrepreneurship initiatives, the roles of government, the industry, scientific community and the academia were well established. In a depressed and import-dependent economy like Nigeria, bioscience entrepreneurship can be of significant multifaceted advantage in several apparently unexplored areas which may include vivarium development/management, diagnostic reagents development/validation and biotechnology/recombinant DNA technology products as well as herbal drug discovery/development, amongst others.

Conclusion: Imperatively, in Africa, Scientists/Professionals would need to make science more “translatable”, solve problems, meet needs and add values. There is need to think of institutional research and enterprise parks, bioentrepreneurship labs and the enhancement of existing technology incubation centres. With bioscience entrepreneurship, African intellectual content would be enhanced, more home-grown products would emerge and the continent would become a developer of technology rather than just remaining a consumer of it.

Keywords: Bioscience; Entrepreneurship; Expertise; Innovation