Business plans for bioscience students

The second assignment in the Bio Enterprise and Employability module was a business plan. For this, I had to build on my experiences from the Dragon’s Den day. It was set and marked by Chris Walker.

For the assignment, we had to use the Simply Do Ideas format, which turned out to be easy to use and understand. It is split into six sections:

• Concept – explaining your business (e.g. the idea behind it).
• Contents – what your business will consist of.
• Customers – who will be interested in buying your product/service.
• Competitors – companies carrying out similar work to yours.
• Compatibility – how well suited you are to running the business.
• Cash – how you will make money and costs of running the business.

 We were instructed to write the business plan on a biology-based business, so I needed to take a step away from the garlic bread restaurant from the Dragon’s Den.

I created this using wordcloud. I used data from the abstracts of these papers.

 

I feel the Dragon’s Den day prepared me well for this assignment, which went smoothly (apart from some technical issues with uploading it to Turnitin). It marked the halfway point in my assignments.

I enjoyed writing a business plan more than I thought I would. It was certainly different to any other university assignment I have written.

If I were to do another business plan, I would probably base it on a different type of business to the ones from both this assignment and Dragon’s Den.

This assignment has slightly changed my views on starting a business, which I feel I may do in the future. It has also encouraged me to take classes different to ones I would normally do, as I have found it can add variety to my skill set and experience.

I hope my business plan was more realistic than this. (Photo from http://errantscience.com/).