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Team:Manchester/businessplan2
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Once the methods described during this project have been fully optimised, we believe that the ideas presented here have the potential to become a real player in the palm oil market. Producing the main palm oil components the E. c(oil)i way would drive down costs and, more importantly, safeguard the remaining rainforests. The following pages are a summary of our business plan, and the full document can be found by clicking on the button to the right.
Company Summary
The company is the brainchild of a group of university students primarily from the University of Manchester. The team has spent, in total, hundreds of man hours in the research and the development of the product and the method of production to get it how it is in its current form.To date the team has developed a functional method to produce this synthetic palm oil from utilising E. coli to produce the components of palm oil. Work has also been done surrounding the potential of assigning intellectual property rights to the production process we have been utilising to produce our product (see the Patenting pages)
As a team largely composed of personnel who are experienced and educated in the field of science and synthetic biology, together we form a powerful unit.
Company Ownership
The company will be owned by the ten group members and the University of Manchester, each holding equal shares. Due to countries such as Malaysia being largely economically dependent on the current cultivation and processing of palm oil, the team is eager to minimise the impact this business would have on these countries. For this reason, licences to use the business would be offered to the Malaysian government at a negotiated price that would reflect the current value of palm oil. The Malaysian government would then be permitted to use the processes involved in E. c(oil)i to continue to profit from trade in palm oil components. It is predicted that replacing traditional methods of palm oil production with E. c(oil)i would support the economy of Malaysia.
It is hoped that the costs for running E. c(oil)i would be reduced when the business is operating in Malaysia due to differences in staffing costs and utilities bills.
Photo © smelly13cat
