Small Chemical Business Symposium Report at Nova 10/11/12

Award-winning symposium: Starting and Financing a Small Chemical Business

Photo by M.Z. Hoffman L to R: M. Morello, S. Vercellotti, J. Maclachlan, J. Sabol, S.Seelig, M. Chorghade, M. Bruce, J. Driscoll, T. Barton

This award winning symposium earned a ChemLuminary award at the 15th Annual Awards Ceremony September 10, 2013 in Indianapolis, IN  for Outstanding Collaboration between a Local Section and a Division: Northeastern Local Section and the Division of Small Chemical Businesses

Guest blog post by Jack Driscoll, PR Chair NESACS

Waltham, MA, Oct.11,2012- When Nova Biomedical Corp. in Waltham, MA agreed to host the 926^th meeting of the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (NESACS), we asked whether we could add an afternoon symposium to the venue and received an enthusiastic “yes”.  Our section, NESACS, is the largest of the 187 sections of the ACS with 7,500 members mostly in the greater Boston area. Most people are surprised to hear that.  The symposium program is described here.

 The program included a summary of the ACS programs for Entrepreneurs, programs available from MA Small Business Development Center, the startup of Nova in the nineteen seventies, conventional  and

SBA financing. Other subjects included advantages of executive education for Tech entrepreneurs, non dilutive and dilutive equity funding and an enlightening talk on the advantages of tweeting and other social media for marketing your businesses. Madeleine Jacobs, Executive Director & CEO of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific organization with 164,000 members talked about jobs and ACS programs for entrepreneurs that is described at http://www.acs.org/ei. We had a number of our NESACS  members describe “True Stories of Chemical Entrepreneurs”. The first described how he worked with Senators Kennedy and Dole to get government R&D funding for small businesses in the early 80’s. This became the NSF SBIR programs. Another, of the Movie “21” fame (MIT entrepreneurs develop a system to predict the cards in blackjack) and a serial entrepreneur describes four of her new ventures in biofuels, drug discovery etc.  The last true story was about of the start up of a contract drug discovery company. 

We had very lively discussions on financing small companies and how the Nova start up (no venture capital just bank financing) in the 1970’s could not be duplicated today.

We had 50 participants at this meeting with 30% NESACS members, 30% from Universities,  30% small business owners and a number of  patent attorneys. We also had Vivian Walworth, an entrepreneur, attend the seminar. On Thursday evening she received an award for being a 70 year member of the ACS. She is still very active in NESACS activities.

This symposium was organized by Dr. Mukund Chorgade, President,   Chorgade Enterprises  and immediate past chair of the Small Chemical Business Div. of the ACS, and Dr. Jack Driscoll, President, PID Analyzers, LLC, and Public Relations Chair of NESACS.

The symposium was sponsored by NESACS, the NESACS Government Relations Group,  the Small Chemical Business  Division of the ACS  and Nova Biomedical. 

Prepared by

Dr. Jack Driscoll,

Public Relations Chair of NESACS