Not all of Richard
Ash's projects involve potential start-ups. His students have twice used
INCOGEN, a well-established Williamsburg-based bioinformatics firm, as a basis
for projects. It was a mutually rewarding experience.
"I have to say, we
got a good bit of information out of it," said Maciek Sasinowski, INCOGEN CEO.
"It wasn't anything that made us a billion-dollar company, but the students
worked very hard and I was very impressed with the insights they were able to
gain after a relatively short amount of time and fairly limited conversations
with us."
Sasinowski is a William and Mary alum, as are several of his
employees, and the firm has enjoyed a cordial working relationship with the
College. INCOGEN has even been involved in a number of research collaborations
with William and Mary faculty and other researchers, so the company was a
natural subject for Ash's working groups.
"Even at the very first
meeting, they were well informed," Sasinowski said. "It wasn't one of those
meetings where they just showed up and had to be told what INCOGEN was about.
They clearly spent time on our web site getting acquainted with our company and
industry and came prepared--it made a good first impression. I asked them to
take a close look at our current business model and our strategy, and to explore
whether there were other uses for our technology for which it made sense to
consider outside financing, like venture capital."
He said he
incorporated some of the group's insights into his operation, and was impressed
by one group's "what else can it do?" suggestion. The groups were apparently
inspired by the success of INCOGEN's cooperative effort with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to adapt
technologies originally developed for the analysis of biomolecular data for use
on marine buoys monitoring the state of wind, waves and water in the York
River.
"So the students thought that we should use our existing
technology to develop a consumer-level product to remotely monitor water quality
in swimming pools," Sasinowski said. "The idea was to attach a probe to one of
those automatic pool cleaners and have it send data to your home computer to
tell you the pool temperature, pH and let you know if there's a problem. We
didn't pursue that, because ultimately we felt it would defocus us too much, but
it was refreshing to see the students think out of the box. That's what
business is all about, whether in the start-up phase or ten years down the road,
and it was clear that Professor Ash inspired and encouraged those attitudes in
his students."