• Question: If your work succeeded and you got an awful lot of support would you start up a company in hopes of making it better or would you stay a one person party?

    Asked by Matthew to Andrew, Lizzie, Nick, Sonia on 18 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by 563artc49.
    • Photo: Elizabeth Kapasa

      Elizabeth Kapasa answered on 18 Jun 2015:

      That’s tricky. I think I would love to have my own company but there are a lot of challenges that come with it since you’re no longer just and engineer, but you need to be a manager, an accountant and an entrepreneur – so you definitely would need to employ people to work with you. This seems to be quite common so there are a lot of SMEs (small and medium companies).

    • Photo: Andrew Phillips

      Andrew Phillips answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      One of my former PhD students now runs an small orthopaedics company, which she really enjoys doing as she wanted to see the research being used in the real world. But it does mean that she can’t really do research full time any more, and she has had to find out a lot more about being a manager and running a company. There is a project that I’m working on that if we got more funding we would probably set-up a company as we would be starting to make products rather than continuing the research.

      I don’t think anyone in engineering is really one person party, whether you are in research or in a company you have to work with other people. Engineering is a team sport!

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