The entrepreneurship prize recognizes exceptional effort to build a business case and commercialize an iGEM project.
The Best Entrepreneurship Prize recognizes exceptional effort to build a business case and commercialize an iGEM project. This award can go to a new project, or to a previous project that a team has aimed to commercialize. Successful teams will (1) construct a business plan based on customer needs and expert knowledge on feasibility and (2) create a minimum viable product.
Visit the Special Prizes page for more information.
The section below is a separate, independently-written draft, produced by a team member outside the main documentation process. Kept here for reference and comparison; not yet fact-checked by team leadership.
A case for translation thought through and then deliberately declined for now — with the reasoning laid out rather than skipped.
Plausible customers for a closed-loop PET recycler: civil space agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA, CNSA, ISRO), one or two private space-station operators, and possibly Antarctic or deep-sea research bases. Total addressable market over a realistic 10-year horizon: described as tens of units — a contracted-development market, not a venture-scale one.
PETase, MHETase, and the underlying catalytic-triad chemistry are treated as unpatentable, since prior art runs back to 2016. The kill-switch components in use all come from the iGEM Registry or peer-reviewed literature. Possible novel IP identified: the dual-orthogonal NAND topology, and the acoustic-mixer cartridge design — neither of which has been filed, since early public disclosure on this wiki is itself treated as prior art that would block a future patent. A deliberate choice, preferring open contribution over a defensive patent.
Two informal conversations with a flight-systems engineer at a major civil space agency. Takeaway: the agency cares about Technology Readiness Level, not novelty — a TRL-3 student project is interesting but unfundable, while a TRL-5 demonstration would be fundable.
Do not incorporate. Do not file IP. Publish everything, fork the parts into the Registry under an open license, and write a memo for any future iGEM team that wants to push the work forward. Stated conditions under which this decision would be reversed: a wet-lab demonstration of cartridge-scale PET conversion above 30%, or an institutional partner offering vibration-test access.
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