A career in biotech can be a great choice for a multitasking, team-oriented individual who does not fear changes

Choosing a career can be the most difficult decision we make in our lives. Although some people seem to know from childhood what they want to do, others struggle through college and beyond.

Here are some things to know about the biotechnology field that will help you decide if a career in biotech is right for you:

Biotech is an ever-changing field

Science, in general, is ever-changing, so if you work in biotech, you need to be flexible and ready to roll with the changes that come your way. You will work with different people, you will need to learn new procedures, and you may even change where you work throughout your career. If you do not mind changes year after year, you will have a better chance of enjoying biotech.

You will do better in biotech if you are team-oriented

You might imagine your life in biotech in a lab, working by yourself all day. But the truth is that many projects in biotech require teamwork, including operations, production, marketing, and R&D. If you work well with others, you are more likely to excel in a career in biotech.

Biotech requires multitasking

A career in biotech requires multitasking. You will often be working on more than one project at a time and trying to balance it all. It can be fun and challenging, but it can also be stressful if you are someone who prefers to focus on one thing at a time. If you are someone who loves to do a lot at one time, however, biotech might be perfect for you.

Also Read: Biotech startup RWDC raises US$13M co-led by Vickers Venture, WI Harper to produce biodegradable plastic

Biotech requires you to learn quickly and handle setbacks

Biotech is a fast-paced industry that requires much learning and adaptation. You will need to learn quickly, and most likely you will be teaching yourself. You will also need to be resilient and effectively handle setbacks, such as having a project terminated. This can happen for numerous reasons, including business decisions, technical issues, or scientific reasons. If you can handle these types of setbacks and not allow them to shake you, you are more likely to succeed in biotech.

Careers in biotech often come with pressure

A career in biotech will often come with pressure because large amounts of money (sometimes even millions of dollars) will depend on the results of your work. You will also have deadlines and expectations from marketing teams. So, if the idea of pressure terrifies you, biotech is probably not the right fit.

Only you can decide if a career in biotech is right for you. Consider your personal strengths, as well as your likes and dislikes.  Do you prefer a consistent work environment with less pressure and changes? If you do, you have probably already realised that biotech is not for you.

Or do you love the idea of a challenge? Can you learn quickly, handle pressure, work with others and effectively multitask? If you can answer yes to these questions, biotech be perfect for you.

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Image Credit: Drew Hays on Unsplash

This article originally appeared on weigarofolo.wordpress.com.

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Malaysia is one of the most multicultural nations in Southeast Asia, and so are her startups

As famously stated by Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, “individuals don’t build great companies, teams do”. From speaking to both Founders and startup employees over the years, the imperative of building leaders and developing team dynamic has become clear to us.

It is the interaction of each stellar individual member that will maximise the performance of your team.

Back in February, ConnectOne teamed up with iPrice Group, Southeast Asia’s leading price comparison and coupon platform in seven countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, and Hong Kong), to conduct a team building workshop using Emergenetics for their Leadership team in Malaysia.

Working in a region that is a melting pot of different cultures, the company fully embraces diversity — which requires an even greater awareness of each other’s learning style and work habits.

“It’s extremely difficult to understand how to work effectively with other people from different cultural backgrounds with different preferences to think and act. This is crucial to if we want to grow 10x in the business”
– Heinrich M. Wendel, iPrice CTO

Also Read: Indonesia’s Startup Legal Clinic, a helping hand for startups’ legal woes

From that day we found three key lessons on building the ultimate power team:

Lesson 1: Understanding each team members’ communication style as well as your own

We have all heard the saying “communication is key” and this could not be more emphasized for any fast-scaling startup team. It is not only about making sense of your own communication style but understanding those of others.

The workshop brought this dynamic team of leaders together as we guided them on how to adapt their individual approaches to suit one another and to facilitate effective communication.

Lesson 2: There is no one-size-fits-all leadership model

“The most valuable lesson is that no preference or combination of such is the “right” one”
– iPrice participant

Whilst some may argue that scientific tools are restricting and place individuals into boxes, we take an educative approach to identify behavioural preferences and improve self-awareness for better performance.

This allowed participants to recognize their personal strengths and weaknesses, encouraging them to work around them by understanding what works and what does not.

Lesson 3: Knowing your team will better determine what new hires you need

Earlier in the year, we carried out a survey asking members of the startup community on their top hiring and organization problems, and ‘hiring the right people’ easily emerged at the top of the list. Workshop participants shared that uncovering the preferential composition of their team paved the way for continued growth and team improvement as it highlighted what skills and working styles were lacking.

All in all, we want to say a huge thank you to our friends at iPrice for their fantastic engagement during the day and delighted to hear that they continue to reflect upon the day’s learnings three months on.

“We are now able to create our own management style without exhausting ourselves but still able to fulfil the requirements of the role”
– iPrice participant

Likewise, it was an eye-opening experience for our consultants to observe the high-level of willingness demonstrated by the team to learn more about each other and to see the growth that can occur from a single day.

Also Read: Is a career in biotech right for you?

“My role is to ensure that the environment is safe enough for a participant to open up and express their frustrations without fear of being labelled an outcast. That was certainly achieved when the minority thinking preference spoke their minds; and the majority immediately sought to assure them of their value and thank them for their contributions.”
– Joanna Yeoh, ConnectOne Director and Workshop Leader

The workshop helped build rapport for a fast-growing team and improve communication between different leads and seniority. Making the right hire can take many hours and rounds of decision making.

Why waste that talent away by not strengthening how these individuals think and act together as a team?

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It’s high time Singapore SMEs fought back against the evolving cyber-threat landscape

As the Asia-Pacific region undergoes rapid digital transformation, emerging technologies are coming to the forefront of many businesses in Singapore.

Despite the positive business benefits delivered by such technologies – including fostering innovation and optimised workplace efficiencies – with any digitisation comes an inherent risk. As organisations move into this new cyber era, the expanding digital business has opened the door for cyber-criminals to launch increasingly potent and sophisticated attacks.

Due to often limited reliable cyber resources and insufficient IT talent, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are increasingly falling prey to cyber-threats.

In fact, recent surveys show that three in five SMEs in Singapore have had cybersecurity breaches that resulted in business disruptions and data leaks over the past 12 months – and of these, 40 per cent of cyber-attacks in Singapore have been found to target SMEs.

Also Read: The essentials of mapping a customer journey across digital assets

Amidst the constant rise in data breaches, SMEs must stop consigning cybersecurity to the backburner.

By taking a preventative, rather than reactive, approach to cyber defences – such as harnessing the power of cyber AI and fostering a strong – SMEs can overcome the roadblocks they face in defending themselves, and rise as more resilient against the evolving threat landscape.

Raising cyber awareness by cultivating a robust corporate culture

According to a survey from Chubb, half of all SMEs said key staff members may not be fully aware of their obligations to protect the data to which they have access. Even further, the survey found that most do not fully understand what constitutes a cybersecurity risk.

The lack of awareness around the urgency of cyber defence in light of an advanced and evolving ecosystem of cyber-criminals, coupled with the traditional downplaying of such risks, threatens the lifeline of the SME economy in the region.

Therefore it has become critical that SMEs foster a culture of cyber awareness across the entire business – from top management to entry-level employees – which can be achieved as easily as organising regular staff training sessions and briefings on cyber best practices.

Since workplace culture drives employee behaviour, SMEs can engage both new and older employees in campaigns and workshops. Staff training can focus on case studies of previous cyber-attacks, some of which have stemmed from e-mail phishing – clicking on suspicious links, tech support scams, malware infection, among others.

By encouraging such educational programmes at the workplace, businesses can reduce employee vulnerability to cyber-attacks, and educate them on how to boost frontline cyber defence to safeguard critical information.

Overcoming limited resources and talent by tapping into cyber AI defence

While fostering a culture of cybersecurity and getting familiar with potential risk is a strong start, SMEs simply cannot defeat sophisticated cyber-attackers without the help of AI technologies – the cyber threat landscape evolves too quickly, and attacks strike at machine speeds.

And after all, many SMEs still lack sufficient cyber security infrastructure and headcounts required to defend against minor cyber breaches.

Human teams and traditional technologies are already outpaced by cyber-criminals. What will happen when threat-actors turn to AI to supercharge their attack methods? Cyber AI is thus imperative to actively detect and neutralise threats within seconds of it emerging on the network. SMEs will have to arm themselves with AI, combatting these adversaries with machines to win the war of algorithm against algorithm.

Moreover, and a huge value add for SMEs, AI-enabled technologies play an active role in filling the gap of IT talent shortage. Industry sectors that are currently under-staffed are turning to cyber AI defence solutions that autonomously pre-empt and neutralise cyber risks before they turn into full-fledged cyber-attacks. With such technological help, SMEs can minimise the odds of a major cyber incident and lower potential damages.

This has already been proven to work across thousands of customers. In one example, cyber AI found that a senior executive at a financial services company in Singapore became a target of a phishing scam launched by sophisticated cyber-criminals.

After entering into the corporate network via a malicious link within an email, the attackers were able to move laterally through the company’s cyber infrastructure looking to compromise sensitive information.

However, Darktrace’s AI technology identified this suspicious, irregular behaviour within two seconds, buying back critical time for the lean security team to respond and mitigate the threat – before it escalated into a crisis.

Time for cyber-readiness is now

As SMEs currently make up 99 per cent of Singapore’s enterprises, employ two-thirds of the workforce, and account for half of Singapore’s GDP, any vulnerability to cyber-threats will have a toll on our economy and wider society.

Also Read: What I learnt from training Malaysia’s most multicultural startup

These organisations must acknowledge that despite the various barriers they may face, a proactive cyber approach should still be adopted.

The first half of 2019 has seen multiple high-profile cyber incidents and the trend is unlikely to stop any time soon.

Organisations, regardless of size, must not only cultivate a better understanding of cyber-risks among their employees, but also ramp up rapid detection and containment strategies fuelled by AI technology – enabling institutions to stay one step ahead of tomorrow’s threat.

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Content marketing need not only be done by content marketers

The looming content war in Asia

Content was once hailed as king in the new digital economy, a comparison which may be apt in a way beyond originally intended.

While content does have the power of royalty — allowing founders to seize share from competitors, enrich their coffers, and secure market leadership — it is also becoming as scarce.

The content crisis in Asia

To look at it another way, compare the creation to consumption ratio for most forms of digital content. The gripping series you consume on Netflix over the course of a weekend might have taken more than a year to produce and tens of millions of dollars to bankroll.

The same goes for other digital mediums. The column you read in The New York Times may have taken the essayist the course of several weeks to write, revise, and rewrite. The ten-minute documentary you watch on your Facebook Newsfeed was probably created with man-hours a thousand times that figure.

In short, the cost of creating content — including not only money, but time and resources — is spiralling ever upward, and even then, it seems to barely keep pace with our insatiable demand.

But, much like a price war, a content war produces only a pyrrhic victory: The ostensible winner may have the most popular content for viewers now — until that is someone with a bigger warchest comes along to produce more, produce better.

Also Read: What I learnt from training Malaysia’s most multicultural startup

Companies in Asia Pacific staring down a possible content war should avoid one at all costs, and instead take notes from their peers in the region succeeding through co-creation or outright user-generated content.

These collaborative approaches allow the companies to keep pace with the demand for content, while minimizing the necessary investment to the bare minimum. These companies are pioneering a MVC, if you want to repurpose a term from startup terminology, with their minimum viable content.

Everyone is a content creator

Perhaps the most prominent example of co-creation content in Southeast Asia comes courtesy of iflix.

The Malaysian video on demand service launched what it calls a Creators Hub earlier this year, which will incubate 30 content creators for one year, providing them funding, networking, bootcamp, and other resources. As the program is still in first year, the results remain to be seen, but iflix knows very well the goldmine it is tapping into: It will source and develop the very best content creators from the more than 500,000 active across the region.

One platform that has already benefited from a surplus of user-generated content is livestreaming hub Kumu from the Philippines. While Kumu has its own shows produced in-house, the vast majority of its content is user-generated.

The very best of its user-generated content is as creative and slick as any in-house show — these amateur hosts self-produce livestreams that including singing, dancing, improvisational acting, and even games.

The proof that such user-generated content is as effective at capturing hearts and minds as traditionally produced shows is in the numbers: Although it launched only last year, Kumu already boasts of an astounding 500,000 users. Venture capitalists see the value of these user livestreams, too, as a group of top investors, led by Summit Media, invested US$1.2 million in the company at the tail end of last year.

Their dollar goes further here: That warchest will support exponentially more user-generated content than it will studio-produced shows.

Even traditional publications are getting in on the action.

Social news network Rappler has been embroiled in political issues as of late, which has arguably overshadowed its incredible effort for user-generated content with RapplerX. The platform allowed non-journalists to contribute meaningful stories, as part of the company’s overall commitment to citizen journalism.

That RapplerX is reportedly being shuttered to give way to building a new, improved platform only shows the value of user-generated content. Rather than adding more journalists one-by-one, you can expand storytelling capability exponentially by giving way to community voices.

It would be a mistake to think that co-creation and user-generated content can only benefit companies already in the media space. Entrepreneurs in consumer or enterprise verticals would be well served to look into producing their content this way, as part of a more efficient bid to be the thought leader of their respective industry.

Recruitday in the Philippines, for example, is leveraging knowledge and data gleaned from its stakeholders — job seekers, recruiters (“Scouts”), and employers — to create content beneficial for all three, in a way that no other competitor can. This creative alchemy helps job seekers land the perfect job, scouts to successfully refer candidates, and employers find the best talent.

Also Read: The clock is ticking for SMEs to get their shields up against cyber-threats

Other consumer and enterprise companies should take note and think of ways on how they can use their already existing community to create content marketing that is a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Content marketing, in short, need not only be done by content marketers. You can tap into the collective wisdom of your community and emerge with a winning strategy.

While your peers sink time, money, and resources into expensive, company-owned content, you should turn to co-creation and user-generated content to achieve thought leadership in your space, and before long, market leadership.

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The startup arm at Intellectual Ventures formed a joint venture with NTU’s innovation and enterprise company NTUitive

ISF Incubator announced that it has formed a joint venture with NTUitive, the innovation and enterprise company of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore to form a new 3D printing startup called Secur3DP+.

Secur3DP+ is a startup that brings additive manufacturing to global companies by providing a supply chain hub for 3D printing. The system is built on a blockchain solution.

Secur3DP+ will be initially funded by a contribution of seed capital from ISF Incubator. It also has partnered with NAMIC (the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster led by NTUitive) to tap into the country’s thriving startup and 3D printing ecosystem.

Secur3DP+ claimed that it has acquired certain patents and patent applications related to 3D printing and it has access to NTU’s expertise in 3D printing and blockchain. With Secur3DP+, additive manufacturing is intended to be a viable option for more companies through the creation of a global 3D printing network that will connect companies with vetted service providers.

Secur3DP+ allows secure workflow solutions through validation and authorisation of all projects, ensuring the right products are created and delivered in the most cost-effective way, and it enables startups and multi-national corporations to protect and track their IP assets.

Also Read: Indonesia’s Startup Legal Clinic, a helping hand for startups’ legal woes

“Our partnership with NTU gives us access to one of the region’s top technology institutions,” said Jerome Hewlett, vice president and head of Asia business development for ISF. “We will continue to look for strong local entrepreneurs to lead other companies throughout the region.”

“Our company is filling a critical gap in the mass adoption of 3D printing,” said Eng Kiat Low, CEO of Secur3DP+. “By creating a global ecosystem of trusted partners, we hope to accelerate the adoption of 3D printing and allow businesses all over the world to get the products they need and do so securely, anytime, anywhere.”
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