XXXXXXXXXXXXX JENNY LEWIS
Q KITTY LIAO
graduated from Fu Jen University in her native Taiwan with an electronic engineering degree in 2008. After gaining an MSc in physics at Imperial College London, she moved to Switzerland for three years to work on the Large Hadron Collider. Following a stint as an Ivy League research fellow at Brown University, Liao returned to the UK and started Ideabatic in 2016 with the chief aim of “saving millions of lives” with her vaccine cooling system. Last year she secured an enterprise fellowship at the Royal Academy of Engineering, where her mentor is Richard Goodwin, MD of British engineering group Goodwin plc. She is a member of IoD 99. For information about this network for new entrepreneurs, visit
iod.com/99
28
director.co.uk
HOW CAN I INTEREST INVESTORS IN MY SOCIAL ENTERPRISE?
Kitty Liao has invented a cooling system to preserve vaccines in transit to remote parts of the world. Her venture needs more finance, but how to attract it when maximising returns is secondary to her goal of saving millions of lives? She consults our experienced panel of IoD members
Words Ryan Herman
It’s estimated that preventable diseases will kill about 2.5 million people this year, half of whom will be aged under six, according to the World Health Organization. If this doesn’t give you pause for thought, then consider that 85 per cent of potentially life- saving vaccines are rendered useless in the last mile of their journey.
In order to work, vaccines must be kept at a temperature range of between 2ºC and 8ºC until use, but they are often exposed to heat when they’re being transported inside basic cool boxes to remote parts of the developing world and during the immunisation process.
Given the cost of making and exporting these products, this represents a billion- dollar problem, but Kitty Liao has come up with a solution. The founder and CEO of Ideabatic has invented a “smart last-mile vaccine cooling system” called Smile. One of its design innovations is a self-closing lid – a simple yet crucial measure to protect the precious cargo from heat damage. Liao, an expert in low-temperature R&D, learnt of the problem at a “humanitarian hackathon” in Geneva, where participants tackled health, communication and transport challenges. “I thought: ‘There must be a way to solve this,’ so I decided to focus on it full time,” she recalls. Liao’s venture has since secured more than £300,000 in grants and won several innovation awards. This has enabled her to continue developing Smile and file for a number of patents. Understanding that grant funding may not be sustainable, she set up Ideabatic as a profit-seeking social enterprise with the primary goal of saving millions of lives, rather than a traditional business or not-for-profit entity. “Ideabatic needs to make money to sustain its R&D activities,” she says, noting that this first entails finding outside
investment. To this end, she secured a place at the Imperial College Advanced Hackspace, which provides facilities to help inventors commercialise their ideas. “I’ve had to shift from being technically minded, where I simply think about solving the problem, to becoming more business-minded,” Liao says.
Because Smile is a “hardware device, investors have expected to see patents. Some of my patent applications have yet to be processed, but they still require a renewal fee,” she says. “I’d like to know what I can do to attract investors when the primary goal is to get Smile out there and make an impact for those in need,” as opposed to maximising the return on investment. Over to our expert panellists.
To join Director’s reader panel or to seek its advice, email directormagazine@
seven.co.uk, quoting your IoD membership number
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