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 |
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| 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 926th
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.
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
