Project, Product or Company

Abstract

This article focuses on the essentials of building effective, collaborative, team-based organizations. The entrepreneurs and innovators who found and build technology-based organizations comprise out target audience, but most specifically we address the biotechnology and biomedical field.  Two perspectives are provided in the article: 1) advice based on the experiential learning provided by years of experience of building and growing entrepreneurial organizations; and 2) identifying the keys to building effective teams based on some selected the academic or scholarly literature on building effective teams.  Our goal is to provide a perspective that blends real-world lessons filtered through a more scholarly approach based on case literature and other research-based studies.  The material summarized herein is presented as a learning module to the participants in the Biotechnology Entrepreneurship Boot Camp.  Our pedagogical approach in the Boot camp is to lead with the background material and perspective contained herein, and to then have a moderated panel discussion around these and other topics. The moderated panel consists of the key members of a real company consisting of key C-level officers and founders and a venture capitalist who funded the company.  Thus the “theory and practice†of team-based innovation come together via a real-time case.