Advice from Prabaha Sikder

Advice and interview from I-Crops panel 2021. 
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Prabaha: I’ll try to put my experiences and my journey in the form of a story. Hopefully it helps the graduate students, postdocs, or maybe an aspiring faculty. So the technology or the product which I’m going to talk about was based on the I-Corps site program is an inner body fusion cage, it’s a medical device. I’ll briefly describe what the product does. 

Many of us in the U.S. suffer from back pain, so when the back pain is excruciating we visit a spine surgeon. If it's a tremendous back pain which cannot be rectified by physical therapy or exercises, the surgeon suggests you do a spinal fusion surgery. Basically what happens in the spine is a surgeon inserts a spinal cage, it's like a spacer between the two vertebrates which otherwise slides onto each other. That’s when you meet the team, and what happens is the fusion cage is inserted between the two vertebrates and a solid fusion of bonus created that is structured so that the whole junction is kind of immobilized. It becomes one solid section or a joint and it does these moving parts, the moving vertebrates do not move which is creating the pain. 

I came up with a material formulation when I was ending my Ph.D., which can help accelerate bone growth in that area. All the existing cages right now in the market are not capable of doing so. I was not much into pursuing this formulation further because my advisor was not interested in working with this material.

What I did was I kept that formulation at the back of my mind and I developed a skill set which is greater to the clinical application of these medical devices. Because I went to University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as a postdoc, I developed and I saw how these medical devices are surgically inserted in rodents and all kinds of in vivo studies which are required if you want to successfully translate your project from an in vitro standpoint or from a preliminary study to the next stage on grounds of a medical device. 

I had the aspiration to learn because I wanted to see the next step of the applications of the medical devices which I was developing on a bench top. So I got that skill set, and then I was lucky enough to get a position at Cleveland State as a tenure track assistant professor and ‘boom’ I had the independence to pursue what I actually left off at the end of my Ph.D. I had the independence now and I made the best use of it by pursuing that and during my first semester at Cleveland State.  I was introduced to UAkron’s wonderful site program and it was, trust me, it's like a story. 

It was a fine monday morning when Brian Davis, our associate Dean, and I was forwarded an email about the I-Corps site program. Before that, I did not hear a word about I-Corps, I did not know what it was, but I pursued it. I submitted a one or two page write up and was accepted into the program. It was wonderful because it showed me that even though I have a formulation in mind, I know about the applications. 

In order to find out whether there is a need for this technology or the need of this product in the market was something extremely important. I wanted something that would go beyond the journal papers of the conference publications and see it transition into the market. I-Corps got me out of my comfort zone and had me complete 30 customer interviews, and I managed to pull those off on my own and get the feedback which was very helpful. There's a lot of information which will be given and it’s a wonderful learning experience. Going out and doing the customer discovery and going out into the various parts of your market and talking with different kinds of people. 


Elyse: How do you build trust to get the person you're talking to who you don’t know very well to make connections for you?

Prabaha: The first step is not always going to be positive with that person or stranger. The first time will be a very nice or friendly conversation. In most cases I was lucky enough to talk to people who were willing to help. Some pointers which I followed is that I never tried to sell or I never tried to talk very good about my product or my technology, I always try to give importance to the opinions of that person. This is a very psychological factor which I understand that I'm no expert in psychology, but what I understand is when you ask people and when you value their opinions, are you asking, “What do you think about this? What are your opinions?” People get their confidence “ok, you know the person who’s asking me this question, values my opinion, so why not?” When you start giving that room where you consider people's opinions, that slowly builds up trust with an email before an email afterwards [the interview]. A thank you email will help to build that relationship, but of course at some point the first few interviews where I reached out to people and the answer was straight “no”. I was emotional, but don't be because everyone is busy, everyone has their things so it’s OK. Just move on to the next best contact, that’s all.


Elyse: In the context of your product, service, or business idea, how did you make the decision to take the next step with whatever that may be. I think for most of it was moving into the I-Corps teams, but how did you know what was the biggest factor in choosing to make that next step?


Prabaha: My next step was I had to go from the I-Corps sites where I finished 30 interviews and it wasn't sufficient. I thought I should talk to more people and moreover at the site team I talked to more of the clinicians, but I wanted to explore the other market segments. That’s why I did the team's program and afterwards I was able to find out some more scientific requirements which should go into the product in order to make it a more successful one and to make it to a point where customers who are ready to invest in it. 
I’m going for a PFI program so I’m trying for a PFIRP which is the partner for innovation research partnerships where I could partner with some other organizations as well as industry who help in translating that product. I was able to make this decision because towards the end, our team started to realize the actual value proposition of our product and the limitations of the shortcoming or the knowledge gaps which still exist in the product that is in the market. We understood that we are capable of doing so, provided that we have that suitable partnership, so that's why as a team we decided to go ahead for the PFIRP so that we can generate prototypes with the attributes and the characteristics which we achieved from all the customer discovery interviews. That's how we decided our next step. We are still young as a team to pursue a startup right at this moment, so that's the reason why we didn’t go for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR). 


Elyse: What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators? What advice do you have that you wish somebody had told you early in your process?

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Prabaha: One of the site's programs focused more on a specific segment of my product market. If I knew this, I would have focused on some of the most important segments of that market so that I could know that it’s not just the innovation part. It’s not just about the intellectual merit part, which acts successfully at translating your product so beforehand if you can identify the segment specifically which is responsible for the successful translation of your product or your thought or your technology, it would be helpful to identify the people whom you want to interview. 
The next thing is if you can identify different hypotheses, depending on those, it's very important to have a set of questions which you want to ask in your interviews. Do not just go in for a conversation because your time is valuable and their time is valuable. If you have a set of questions before each of those interviews, that will definitely help you streamline the knowledge of what you want to achieve.