Bio Meets Biz
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Every year, UO seniors compete for a free ride to one of Europe’s top business schools. The competition is a monster—a 20-hour marathon that tests each student’s ability to comb through mountains of data, spot strengths and weaknesses, and collaboratively draw up a business plan for a real-world company.
The contest favors those with the skills you’d expect in a Fortune 500 CEO: leadership, research, analysis, team-building, and problem-solving—all on a tight deadline.
So why was one of this year’s winners—who won a scholarship to an elite business program situated in a 13th century European castle—a biology major?
Because there’s more to biology than lab coats and Petri dishes, says Matthew Boehmer (pictured). After completing his BS in biology in June, Boehmer intends to use his science degree to become a captain of industry.
Boehmer (pronounced “beemer”), of San Diego, was one of three winners of the 2015 University of Oregon–Nyenrode Business Universiteit case competition, conducted on the UO campus by the Lundquist College of Business. This fall, Boehmer (pictured) will attend Nyenrode, a prestigious private university in the Netherlands, on a full scholarship for an accelerated, one-year master’s program in international management.
Boehmer wants to be in business—specifically, the business of ending Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts his grandmother. But he’s not going to be the one in the laboratory staring into a microscope—he’s going to be the one empowering that person to find a cure.
“I have this dream to start my own business—a small- or medium-sized biotech or biopharmaceutical company,” said Boehmer, who is minoring in business. “But as a business person, you can’t connect with scientists if you don’t have a foundation in the field, if you don’t speak the language.”
His interest in these industries stems in part from the guidance of Paul Truex, the head of a San Francisco-based biotech company, Anthera Pharmaceuticals. From Truex, Boehmer learned the importance of cultivating business relationships so that he is well positioned when opportunity knocks.
But Boehmer also credits his studies in biology for giving him the motivation and tools to build a career that feeds his particular passion.
Learning from Failure
Among many other inspirations, he cites Roderick Capaldi, a UO emeritus professor in biology and the cofounder of a biotech company called MitoSciences. Capaldi makes sure that students in his Mitochondria in Health and Disease course understand that there is a world of career options in biology apart from the predictable paths of medicine, research and teaching. UO graduates with biology degrees have landed careers in fields as diverse as food processing, oil manufacturing and market research.
During the course that Boehmer took last fall, Capaldi wove into his lectures interesting tangents about the broader options available to biology graduates—biopharmaceutical sales, for example, if you have not just the science background but also the people skills.
“Science requires an inquisitive nature, stamina, learning—you learn by success but you also learn by failure,” Capaldi said. “In science, when you’re doing research, you learn as much from an experiment not working as from one that does work. That would translate to pretty much any (occupation).”
The centerpiece of Capaldi’s mitochondria course was an assignment to create a mock grant proposal. The intent was to push students to explore a career in the biotech industry, and to start envisioning how to make that a reality.
Working in teams of four or five, students studied a medical topic in biotech, and then developed both a grant proposal and a business plan for a startup. Capaldi covered all the bases, even scheduling individual coffee meetings during which each student was asked to deliver a five-minute elevator pitch on why he should “fund” them.
Boehmer’s team chose to propose a therapy for brain cancer. His passion for the project was apparent to all: Boehmer papered the walls of a study room with research and planning ideas, and soon his teammates were on board for 10-hour, pizza-powered sessions in the library. Research roles were established for each member— except Boehmer, who was at the helm.
His leadership role introduced him to the manager’s art of assessing how each member contributes to the team. “Do they have the potential? How are they going to bring value?” he said. “And how do you motivate them to turn that potential energy into results?”
The team pored over the established body of knowledge about brain cancer, seeking a novel approach to treatment. Their search of the literature prompted a question—how could you control the complex signaling in cells that causes them to grow abnormally?—and they proposed a possible therapy. Although the course didn’t include access to a lab, they tested the plausibility of their premise by evaluating it against documented results in the field. Their conclusion: Cancer’s ability to dodge single-drug therapies by switching from one pathway to another within a cell calls for an intervention that would target multiple pathways at once.
And while not a lab class, Boehmer likens his team’s systematic approach to the gold standard of science inquiry—the scientific method. This step-by-step approach relies on posing a central research question and then gathering data, formulating hypotheses, constructing an experiment to derive measurable outcomes, testing predictions and developing theories.
Boehmer will attend business school at Nijenrode, a 13th-century castle surrounded by a moat.
High-Stakes Competition
For Boehmer, the approach is as well-suited to business as biology, and he deployed it again during the two-day Nyenrode competition earlier this year. Working with four others, he developed a growth strategy for Lendahand, a real-life Dutch finance organization that harnesses crowdfunding to lend money to entrepreneurs in emerging economies around the world.
The high-stakes competition started at 5:00 p.m. on a Thursday when the contestants were given the company’s profile.
Boehmer wouldn’t be assigned his partners or the company objectives until the following morning, so strategizing about how he would approach the company’s yet-to-be-revealed business challenge was out. Instead, he dove deep into company data, staying up until 2:00 a.m. to wrap his arms around any information that might be relevant once his team was assembled later that morning. He realized quickly it would be pointless to try to absorb everything available on the Internet; instead, he consolidated the data, organizing it into categories that could be tapped as easily as scrolling through the apps on your smartphone.
Once his team had been picked at random by the contest committee, Boehmer again found himself the leader, which he attributed to his penchant for big-picture thinking. Each team was given the company’s goals for growth and a list of questions to resolve.
They were then given four hours to write a business plan, and prepare to give a brief presentation and answer questions from the contest committee.
As Boehmer’s team assessed options for establishing the business, one member floated a brick-and-mortar approach: expand the company’s physical presence in developing countries and boost staffing in an effort to find more funding. But it didn’t stand up to the testing that followed, Boehmer said—the team’s research showed that the amount of capital the company had to invest wouldn’t support it.
On the other hand, the group saw promise in expanding the portfolio of clients. The more they vetted this option, Boehmer said, the clearer it became that it tracked with the company’s objectives without putting investors in unnecessary risk. This became their recommended strategy for growth.
“You come up with these strategies, and you have to filter out what would be a good idea or not by thinking scientifically,” Boehmer said. “Every step that we ultimately proposed in our business plan was something that was logical and potentially feasible.”
Boehmer suspects that his team produced the winning proposal because they went above and beyond what was expected. In addition to completing the assigned tasks, they presented a 10-year plan to expand the company while building brand trust and lowering risk to lenders. “Value-added,” in the truest sense of the word.
Looking back on the experience, Boehmer said his business background served him in a contest that might have been daunting for someone whose time in college has been spent almost entirely in a lab. But neither could he discount the role his science major played in the victory, either.
Determining what ails a company is not so different from pursuing a research question in science, he said. Both start with plunging into the unknown, then poring over data, testing hypotheses, and producing conclusions.
“The scientific method is not just, ‘this is why the leaves are green,’” Boehmer said. “The scientific method can be applied to finding a solution to almost any problem, scientific or not. That’s why we’re in college, right? To learn how to learn.”
―Matt Cooper
Photo Illustration: Kelly James