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Top1. Introduction
The Foundation for the development of research in genomics and proteomics in Spain, “Genoma España”, (2001-2013) had among its main goals the promotion of the biotechnology industry. To achieve this, it launched a program to create biotechnology-based companies. The results were extraordinary. In twelve years the number of biotechnology-based companies grew by 459%, as outlined in the ICONO - FECYT report of Indicators of the Science, Technology and Innovation (ICONO-FECYT, 2013) that uses the data from the “Relevance of Biotechnology in Spain 2011” report (Genoma España, 2011). According to data from the European employers association in 2013, the Spanish biotech industry reached eighth place in the Western world. This was truly a “prodigious decade” (J. Barrero, 2013) in which companies, defined as financial instruments that show whether ideas work or not, have consolidated an internationally competitive biotechnology industry in Spain.
However, something was missing. Its promoters, mostly scientists with a very specialized knowledge in one of the technologies - some of them more than a century old - that contribute to biotechnology (Muñoz, E., 1998), lacked a general knowledge in business management. Some of these technologies are biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, genetics, cell therapy, the neurosciences, and productive connections between these disciplines and physical and chemical techniques and technologies: X -ray spectroscopy (crystallography), nuclear magnetic resonance, fluorescence, photonics, and those derived from computational analysis that in the end integrates them into complex fields such as genomics and proteomics, systemic and synthetic biology, bioengineering applied to medicine, nutrition science and countless industrial processes. This lack of business skills was identified as a problem in their relationship with investors, who are necessary agents to the consolidation of their businesses. This is precisely why Genoma España launched an ambitious training project to teach management techniques to biotech executives that ought to be capable to teach its participants the necessary skills for dealing with the venture capital professionals.
Now we will present and describe this experience, in the following order: the designing of the educational process, and then the evaluation of the results obtained in the nine editions of this project. This will be done by dividing this article in three parts the first being the characteristics of the course and its pedagogical context. Then, the different learning strategies used will be explained, together with the results of the educational evaluation about the learning process.