THE INCUBATION OF INNOVATION:

CREATING A CAPITAL-EFFICIENT ECOSYSTEM FOR SUCCESS

Melinda Richter

Founder & CEO, Prescience International

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

With over 15 years of global experience in creating, financing and managing innovative companies in emerging and

convergence technologies, Melinda Richter specializes in accelerating the development of products-to-market, and

companies-to-investment. She is the founder and CEO of Prescience International, a full-scale management firm

which focuses on accelerating the commercialization of science and technology. For Janssen Labs in San Diego, she

guides an operations management team to enable innovative life sciences companies to rapidly deliver better

solutions to the healthcare challenges faced today. In addition to Janssen Labs, the Prescience innovation center

portfolio includes the San Jose BioCenter and the Environmental Business Cluster (EBC). Under her leadership, the

San Jose BioCenter was named one of the best life science incubators in the U.S. by CNN, honored by the National

Business Incubation Association with its 2009 Incubator of the Year Award and granted the Harvard’s Bright Ideas

Award. The EBC, one of the first cleantech incubators ever to be established in the U.S., was ranked as a "Top 10

Incubators Changing the World" by Forbes.com, one of the “Top 10 Start Up Incubators to Watch” by Inc.com, named

by Popular Science Magazine as one of three Places Where Inventors Are Born, and also ranked as a top incubator by

CNN. Richter has served on the governing board of the National Business Incubation Association and currently sits on

boards of University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business Center for Executive Education BioExec Institute,

the San Jose State University's Masters of Biotechnology Program and UC San Francisco's School of Dentistry. She

holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and an M.B.A. from INSEAD in France.

ABOUT THE LECTURE:

Barriers to discovery and development faced by innovative startup companies prevents great science from leaving the

bench and moving to the marketplace. Not the least of these barriers is the flow of capital that is needed to continue

necessary R&D. In order for innovation to happen, it must have the right capital-efficient environment in which

scientists and researchers are able to concentrate on their discoveries. Today’s market realities require an

unconventional ecosystem for them to explore game-changing ideas and move those to success. Addressing the

theme, "The Incubation of Innovation," Richter will share with ACS her successes in developing a new lab model that

boosts success rates for early stage companies and allows them to conserve resources to put their money to work in

an optimized, capital-efficient environment.