PESO :: Philippine Emerging Start-ups Open

Hamsters strike back

Everyone always laughs at my hamster examples. I never do, in fact, I'm always incredibly impressed at their versatility. Here's the latest use for these little cannibalistic rodents -- certainly innovative, but not enough to make it into PESO.

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Maoi Arroyo | PESO Philippines

Deadline Extended!

Great news, the deadline for the submission of the business summary and team submissions is EXTENDED TO SEPTEMBER 19.

On the campus tour side, we were recently at UP Diliman, UP Los Banos, and UST at the invitation of graduate students and faculty. It was really inspiring to see how many people are willing to support PESO.

Thanks for all your emails and your good wishes!

Coconets on the BBC

A Philippine company producing "coconet" was nominated and was selected as one of the finalists for the bbc-world challenge contest. This is basically a search for the best grassroots project.

There will be a documentary about the project which will be shown on the BBC world several times between September to October. It seems that the finalists will also be featured in a special issue of Newsweek. Just being publicised is already good for business.

But it would be nice to win for our country which has been getting very bad publicity nowadays.

Please open www.theworldchallenge.co.uk and vote for the Philippines.

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Dr. Asuncion K. Raymundo
Director
Institute of Biological Sciences
University of the Philippines Los Baños
College, Laguna 4031

PESO @ UPD

In case you missed the technopreneurship workshops, we're having one last mini-overview!

Wednesday, August 24th
Natural Science Research Institute, UP Diliman
9am - 12nn

While this is free, please contact technopreneurship@hybridigm-consulting.com for tickets.

See you there!

Register your teams now!

Don't forget to register your teams at the brand spanking new PESO website!

Deadline for the business plan summaries is on September 9th!

The Importance of Technology Transfer

Last I heard from St. Luke's Research and Biotechnology Division, they had a potential Dengue diagnostic, but no technology transfer policy.

A tech transfer policy determines who owns intellectual property (copyrights, patents, etc.) generated by an institution. Tech transfer is usually managed by a TLO (technology licensing officer), who makes sure there is no conflict of interest and ensures that the institution's knowledge is either spun-out into a start-up or licensed for a fair royalty to existing businesses. This is essential to national development. It is one of the many lucrative employment opportunities related to technopreneurship. As of this writing only UP has a tech transfer policy, and many intellectual property lawyers and businessmen have found it lacking.

If St. Luke's RBD had a tech transfer policy, maybe this Singapore company wouldn't have gotten the drop on them.

Don't lose hope, though. It's not who gets to market first, it's who has the better unfair sustainable competitive advantage!

PESO @ CLSU

Our intrepid CEO, Dickie Gonzalez, will be at Central Luzon State University on August 17, 2005 at 10am!

Catch him and the technopreneurship wave!

One month left

Ony one month to go before the Business Summary is due. Get your team together, dust your theses off your shelves, and start brainstorming! You probably want to use our online resources to polish your summaries. If you need a mentor to look over it, please get in touch with us via peso-info@mit.edu.

In the meantime, check out this free article from MIT about their entrepreneurship ecosystem.