Did you know that your PhD training has built-in entrepreneurial skills training?
Here is an entrepreneurial skill that you have developed as a PhD scientist that you may not even know you have: You know how to prospect different opportunities and identify one most likely to succeed within a given time-frame.
As part of your doctoral degree requirements, you researched under the auspices of an advisor or principal investigator (PI). The PI has many research projects in the lab, and an idea of what she’d like her grad students and postdocs to work on. However, she may generally leave the development of research ideas up to you. You will then need to:
Thoroughly research literature.
Determine which questions remain relevant and unasked.
Launch experiments to answer questions in relevant timeframe.
Analogously, entrepreneurs launching a business must also:
Thoroughly research the market and prospective customers.
Determine which products or services the market and customers demand.
Launch studies and pilot programs in a timely manner so product or service remain relevant to the market and customers.
You have also been trained on marketing skills. When we think of PhD scientists, “marketing” generally don’t pop into our minds as synonymous with a scientific profile. First, let me define marketing:
Marketing is transferring what you have (products or services) to someone who can use what you have and be willing to pay for your products or services (a customer).
To do this, a potential customer (prospect) must first know that your products or services exist, and during the marketing process, you aim to increase awareness of your products or services. Communication is the basis for increasing awareness of what you have. Effective marketing rests of effective communication. A type of business communication is presentation, which is what I’ll focus on in this article.
When it comes to business communication, presentation skills are critical. Whether you are presenting information about your services to prospective clients or fiscal projections to prospective investors, your ability to conceptualize abstract ideas and clearly communicate these ideas to the audience is a major determinant of your successful outcome. There is no surprise that presentation seminars and workshops and coaches and classes inundate the professional development scene: many of us clearly can improve our presentation skills.
As a PhD scientist, you “grew up” presenting information. From the very first year as a PhD student, you were probably expected to give scientific seminars on a topic of your choice (at least that was the case when I was in grad school). You may have spent your second year preparing for a grueling oral examination whereby a mostly unsympathetic committee of faculty members grill you with questions. You may also have teaching requirements, which meant you present to (“teach”) an audience of mostly unsympathetic undergrads. Before you get branded as a bona fide doctorate, you had to defend your dissertation to an audience of faculty and peers.
Thus, by the time your dissertation defense came up, you have probably made over a dozen presentations and have learned how to:
1. communicate with diverse audiences at different knowledge levels;
2. handle objections and questions (including those asked by people who just like to hear themselves ask questions) without appearing flustered or frustrated or with murderous intent;
3. say “I don’t know”*, because you realize that even when you may think you know more about that one obscure protein/pathway/nematode better than anyone else, someone in the audience is going to ask you a question that you won’t know the answer to;
An entrepreneur marketing products or services apply principles of the above presentation skills to communicate with clients and prospective buyers, handle objections, and say “I don’t know” to questions he or she doesn’t know the answer to.
Go past what meets the eye in your PhD education and you may find a wealth of entrepreneurial skills at your service.
*Note: I hear that an honest “I don’t know” answer is quite difficult for a PHD scientist to give. Learn to admit that you don’t know it all, because in the business world and the real world, you are often given the humility test by people who want to see if you can admit that you don’t know.
