Jennifer Rossi, Vice President of Sales and Marketing — June 12, 2014

This week, I went to an Xconomy conference, boston2034 (#xcon2034), in an effort to put the future of Boston Business and Kerafast’s Business in perspective and to help me think about shaping Kerafast for the future. With a star-studded list of successful inventors, entrepreneurs, academics, financiers and philanthropists as speakers, I knew I would have a lot of food for thought both during and after the conference. There was one theme frequently discussed which especially resonated with me and our Mission at Kerafast: Collaboration and Sharing.

John Abele, from Boston Scientific, kicked off the speakers talking about the future of collaboration and the keys to collaborating successfully as a company. Some startup companies do collaboration really well, others do not. Personally, I have had the pleasure of working for some that do, some that don’t collaborate and everything in between. At Kerafast, collaboration is paramount to our business, as our Providers are investigators at institutions across the Globe.

John Hawthorne, founder and CEO of MassChallenge, discussed trends of startups in 2014 leading to success in 2034; one of the key trends is sharing. MassChallenge is a startup accelerator, and John himself mentioned being involved with 489 startup companies! Many of those successful startups have had a sharing-centric business model. The idea about sharing is that people do not need to own or have everything, now, and even less in the future; things like cars, lawnmowers and chainsaws. I also relate this to how at Kerafast, we are helping investigators to share their life science research tools with the Global community by marketing and promoting them and then sharing the sales revenues with the investigator and institution creating the reagents.

The talks were all so enlightening and the future is bright, especially here in Boston where we have the resources and talent to drive innovation across so many industries! I cannot finish this blog post, however, without mention of the talk by Dean Kamen, of DEKA R&D; inventor of the Segway, “Luke” prosthetic arm for soldiers (described here in a TED talk) and founder of FIRST, a non-profit that inspires students of all ages to be science and technology leaders. Dean Kamen is both genius and inspirational, and he got me thinking more about sharing and our Mission at Kerafast to build a Community of Researchers Giving Back to Science. I am glad we are on the right track and I am looking forward to initiating more collaboration and sharing at Kerfast.