Building the FREDsense Team

The team is a critical component of any business and is therefore of critical importance to ensure our success within FREDsense. FREDsense was born out of the Calgary 2012 iGEM project, which developed the initial ideas for the technology behind our toxin detecting device. While the team was composed of over 30 students, six key players have joined together to develop this technology into a feasible business. Because of the number of students and professors which were involved in the previous year's project, numerous tasks were assigned to determine our group's right to operate within the framework of the iGEM competition. Our approach to IP protection, and how we have collected our intellectual property can be found in the IP section of the wiki.

With a core group of individuals identified to lead the company through it's early development, it was additionally important to determine what positions our company would need in order to have success. While our present group has a detailed technical background, we lacked the business and legal framework required to achieve success within the company. We identified the most critical components of our business could be grouped into four key divisions listed below:

While many of these positions are not of critical importance within an early start-up framework, our group aims to bring on players with key skill sets in all four of these major divisions of our company. Achieving an advisory board (detailed below) of strong players with technical, business, and legal expertise has been our first step in bringing the right people into our company. The evolution of our team will occur as skill sets are needed, identifying business and technical experts to aid in engineering and prototype development of our system and in financial recording and accounting.

Company Structure

Our group has divided ourselves into distinct roles in order to achieve our goals. These include the roles of Chief Technical Officers Robert Mayall and Maggie Renaud-Young both who have extensive experience in developing our technology further. Both have a strong technical background as well as significant experience working together. While Robert will be leading the development of the electrochemical reporting side of things, Maggie, with a background in molecular genetics, will be leading the strain development. Our Chief Operating Officer, Iain George, has had extensive experience managing iGEM projects. With his proven skills in enforcing deadline, he will ensure the timely delivery of our technology on budget. Lisa Oberding, our Chief Marketing Officer has been instrumental in constructing our market evaluation and will be responsible for ensuring our product is developed with an appropriate end-user focus. With formal training in petroleum microbiology, Lisa will be critical in assuring the design of our product meets the needs of the industry. In addition, with significant experience in graphic design, she will be responsible for advertising and marketing of our product through web, print, and other media outlets. Finally, David Lloyd and Emily Hicks act as chief executive officers of the company with roles of identifying potential avenues of funding, ensuring the communication of our project effectively to our board of directors, and developing our business. With significant experience advising iGEM teams over the past three years, they have acquired the strong management and communication skills skills required for this role. While David has a strong technical background in biochemistry and demonstrated leadership skills, Emily brings her strong communication skills to the team. This breakdown incorporated into our team requirements can be seen below:

Incorporation

As a next step for our group, our six members have begun the process of incorporating our business. This has involved engaging legal professionals to maintain the rights of our company FREDsense Technologies. We have established a share structure, secured the name FREDsense Technologies, and begun to protect our identity as a corporation. We have also created an unanimous shareholders agreement (USA) to ensure that our team is working together strongly to build this company up in the future.