Industry

The Industry team is responsible for all fundraising and sponsorship opportunities to support the growth of UManitoba Prairie iGEM, including Jamboree registration, travel costs and beyond. Manitoba is growing in the bioscience industry, where we are the largest exporting industry segment for pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing. As a growing bioscience province, companies have indicated recruitment as an obstacle and indicated three major skill gaps: critical thinking, project management and leadership. UManitoba Prairie iGEM is helping solve these challenges and grow our province, by giving students the opportunity to learn.

Throughout the past 8 months the industry team was quite busy!

Starting off, the Industry team had the UofM Faculty of Science (FoS) give us a workshop related to fundraising and the development of fundraising materials.

3K Spark Pitch Competition

Next we competed in a pitch competition called 3K Spark Pitch Competition Asper + Science, back in March. Although the primary objective was to win the cash prize, we were still successful in spreading the word on UManitoba Prairie iGEM and creating awareness to the community about the power of synthetic biology.

Sponsorship Package

Afterwards, we had a huge focus on creating and editing a sponsorship package, aimed to send to external sponsors, with the goal of establishing partnerships that will help retain young bioscience talent in Manitoba. During this time, we also worked on the Impact Grant application in an attempt to receive $2,500.

Read our Sponsorship Package here!

Networking with Local Businesses

Additionally, we attended a couple of networking events, Biotech Connect and one with the Bioscience Association Manitoba (BAM) in order to get to know more potential external sponsors. We also had a meeting with BAM in order to see if they could help us further in reaching out to more of the companies under their umbrella. Throughout, we had been contacting all the faculties with University of Manitoba, mainly within the separate life science departments for funding. Our main focus recently has been emailing potential external sponsors with our sponsorship package, as well as working with various members of FoS in establishing our crowdfunding page.

Our work does not end here as we are passionate to continue promoting the growing synthetic biology community in Manitoba to ensure the support of UManitoba Prairie iGEM in years to come.