September 2007
Best Practices: Perfecting its partnering system

BIO schedules 12,103 meetings between 6,000 delegates representing 1,503 companies

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

In the weeks preceding the BIO Business Forum, held in conjunction with the 2007 BIO International Convention, May 6–9, 2007, at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, 6,000 delegates representing 1,503 companies searched BIO’s online database of business profiles to identify potential partners. By the cut-off date about two weeks out, BIO had logged 65,000 meeting requests.

“The business that our companies are in is at the frontier of scientific, biological and medical research,” says Alan Eisenberg, Executive Vice President, Emerging Companies and Business Development, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO, www.bio.org), Washington, DC. “The time it takes to get a product to market is over a decade, and it takes about a billion dollars, including the cost of failures. They have an incentive to work with other companies that have complementary technologies to help speed the process along.”

The three-day forum brings together delegates from biotech and pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions and investment banking for pre-scheduled, 30-minute meetings to explore opportunities for working together. Though formally branded as the BIO Business Forum in 2002, the partnering process has been going on at the BIO convention since the ’90s.

“Early on, it was done on chalkboard and paper,” Eisenberg says. “In the late ’90s, we developed software and have continuously refined it since it became operational in 2001.”

When delegates register for the forum, they receive a username and password to access the system via the Internet. They enter detailed profiles about their companies, financing needs, research projects and intellectual properties that they can license or seek to license. About a month before the convention, they begin to search the database profiles for potential partners, then submit their meeting requests. Because the average emerging biotech company works on five projects at one time — pharma companies can have dozens of projects — a single delegate could request 10 or more meetings. The software matches the requests and schedules the meeting times and locations.

“It becomes a complex, multivariate exercise,” Eisenberg says. “We run the matching program over a weekend a couple of weeks prior.” It takes several runs to generate a workable schedule. With each run, more “dance cards” are filled. The program continues to run on site to fulfill meeting requests that arise during the forum. This year, the program winnowed 65,000 requests down to 12,103 mutually agreed-upon meetings.

The matchmaking system for the BIO Business Forum is not to be confused with the myBIO Personal Show Planner developed by BDMetrics (www.bdmetrics.com) for the convention and exhibition, which had 22,366 attendees and 2,187 exhibiting companies in 2007.

“myBIO helps attendees be more organized and make the best use of their time,” says Robbi Lycett, Vice President, Conventions and Conference. “The types of meetings that exhibitors want to have because of their exhibit participation are not the types of meetings we would schedule in the forum.”

Though it could be ideal to merge the two systems into one portal, Eisenberg says he’s waiting to see how the technology evolves before exploring that option. In the meantime, planned enhancements for BIO’s proprietary software include an improved user interface and better integration with the registration system.

With deal-making activity on the rise in the $90 billion biotech industry, the BIO Business Forum has impacted the growth of the convention, which attracted 15 percent more attendees and nearly 30 percent more exhibitors in 2007 compared with 2006.

“The BIO Business Forum brings a higher level of attendee to the convention because of the type of people who are trying to make deals,” Lycett says.

Sidebar: Bio Business Forum’s Strategy
Goal:  Facilitate deal-making among delegates.
Objective:  Introduce potential business partners through pre-scheduled meetings.
Strategy: Develop matchmaking software with searchable database of company, project and licensing profiles.
Tactics:  Provide delegates with password-protected access to enter profiles, search for partners, and request meetings; automate match-making and scheduling.
Results:  BIO scheduled 12,103 meetings in 2007, 10 percent more than in 2006.