High-tech Entrepreneurship: Lecture #5 – Let’s do it seriously: going beyond the first steps and scaling up. How to deal with industrial and financial partners.

This course is designed to introduce participants, PhD and undergraduate students from different disciplines (STEM, but also Social Sciences and Humanities) and also young researchers and post-docs, to the basic knowledge and competences about high-tech entrepreneurship.

Topics: more about entrepreneurial motivations; how to engage an industrial partner; bridging between university and industry; how to deal with initial funders; from prototype to products: where to find info and technical solutions; to grow or not to grow? Is it better to own a small cake or a slice of a big cake?

Speaker:

Gioia Lucarini (Relief) received her MS degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pisa in September 2009. In the same year she joined the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna as a Ph.D. student and in 2013 she obtained the Ph.D. in Medical Robotics. Since March 2019 she is CEO of Relief srl (www.reliefsrl.com), a startup, spin-off of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, with the main objective to develop an innovative endourethral sphincter against urinary incontinence.

Massimiliano Simi (MMI) is co-founder and Vice President of Medical MicroInstruments (MMI) SpA, which developed the first teleoperated robotic platform for suturing in open surgery with wristed micro instruments. MMI was funded by a Venture Capital for more than 20 million Euros.