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Business Alum Harnesses Entrepreneurial Know-How
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Associate Professor and Entrepreneurship Program Director Mark Cannice and business instructor Larry Louie congratulate Robert Lahaderne '07, after Lahaderne won second place in the semi-final of the USF International Business Plan Competition in April. |
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Recent Master of Business Administration graduate Robert Lahaderne claimed second place in the semi-final round of the USF International Business Plan Competition this spring, with a proposal to improve hemodialysis for hundreds of thousands patients.
Lahaderne ‘07, who graduated with an MBA in December, also received an overall honorable mention in the April 24-26 competition, which awarded approximately $25,000 to teams of business students and recent graduates with the best business plan proposals. The 22 competing teams hailed from such top-tiered schools as Duke University, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), Cambridge University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Far from being the purely profit-driven capitalists that some envision as “entrepreneurs,” it’s those who start their own business that often end up working with medical professionals and engineers to develop new medical devices or communications technologies that connect families, said Mark Cannice, executive director of USF’s entrepreneurship program and founder of the competition.
Since founding the competition in 2003 as a way to leverage USF’s location in the global heart of venture capital and technology innovation and build the School of Business and Management’s reputation, Cannice has seen USF’s rank as an entrepreneurial campus climb into the top 25 in the nation, according to Forbes Magazine and Princeton Review (2006). Just as important, the contest serves USF’s mission to educate minds and hearts to change the world. “I believe that entrepreneurship is a noble calling, as it is the entrepreneurs of the world that form organizations that solve people’s problems or create opportunities for them,” Cannice said.
It was just that type of thinking that inspired Lahaderne’s one-man team business proposal. As a marketing employee at a well-known medical device maker in the Bay Area, he immediately grasped the potential of so-called shape-memory polymers, or plastics, being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Berkeley. “Working with the lab, I proposed licensing the technology to create a reflow hemodialysis adaptor,” Lahaderne said.
Essentially, shape-memory polymers’ flexibility allow them to be formed into a tiny “trumpet,” or reflow adaptor, and inserted into a patient’s vein to reduce the pressure and damage to the vascular system, and damage to the blood during dialysis, Lahaderne said. While pumping blood through a patient’s veins during dialysis may not seem violent on the face of it, the force is known to rip blood cells apart. If brought to market, the reflow adaptor could improve dialysis efficiency for about 200,000 patients in America, he said.
Judged on criterion of being able to define a problem in the market, provide a product or service to address the need, project revenues and profits based on the market, and define the amount of money needed from investors, Lahaderne finished in the top eight in the competition overall.
“He gave an outstanding performance,” Cannice said of Lahaderne.
Now, Lahaderne is pushing on, entering other business plan competitions and hoping to attract potential investors’ attention, so that he is eventually able see his idea make a difference for patients, Lahaderne said.
The competition’s grand prize of $10,000 went to Dynamics, a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University. The team’s proposed “smart” credit card, a low-cost, paper-thin card – essentially a small computer – could help eliminate $22.5 billion in fraud annually by changing a portion of its number on a regular basis. The number would change visually, via an electronic display, and magnetically, via a programmable magnetic strip, to prevent credit card theft. 
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