Customer Development and Strategic Investigations

Buckle Therapeutics

Mentor

Malcolm Nason, PhD, MBA, Chief Commercial Officer at Buckle Therapeutics

Company Overview

Buckle Therapeutics has developed a unique method of delivering soluble drugs through the buccal membrane of the mouth.  Our patented delivery system provides drug manufacturers an alternate method of accessing the bloodstream, avoiding first-pass metabolism in the stomach without the necessity of injections or intravenous access.

There are several commercial opportunities that the device offers that need further exploration, substantiation, and valuation. This externship will explore one of the most pressing current medical issue: opiate overdose rescue medication.

Externship Description

This externship may be of interest to individuals who are curious about the key discovery activities of commercializing a new product during the building of a new company.  The externship is based on the concept of customer development and will follow some of the educational platforms designed for the ICorps program. Activities will include summarizing the current literature to form hypotheses about possible stakeholder needs, identifying 30 – 40 stakeholders and interviewing as many of them as possible to test hypotheses, then summarizing overall findings in a PowerPoint presentation.  Stakeholders on the ‘professional’ side could range from psychiatrists, neurologists, geriatricians, and medical directors of foundations or skilled nursing facilities.  Stakeholders on the ‘consumer’ side could range from students, family members, patients, and caregivers.

The skills acquired in this externship are readily transferrable into the private sector in many areas: business development, program management, market research, strategy, business transformation, clinical development, and many others. The basic format will consist of 2 weeks of training and hypothesis formation, 4 weeks of customer discovery and iterative hypothesis testing, and 2 final weeks dedicated to the development and refinement of the deliverable which will be presented to the CEO and the President.  While some parts of the externship deliverable will remain proprietary, where confidentiality will be expected, it will have aspects that can become part of an Extern’s portfolio.

Primary Responsibilities

Depending on alignment with skills/interests, the extern will work on one or more of the following projects:

• Develop and test hypotheses about the commercial value of the Buckle Therapeutics device
• Perform iterative customer discovery (market research), including writing of discussion guides, customer development (finding, contacting, scheduling interviews), and developing interview skills.
• Produce presentations of relevant knowledge, including landscape analyses, SWOT analysis and testing, and marketing analysis. (Each of these deliverable elements will be considered “Works in Progress” since there is not sufficient time in the Externship to finish all of them)

Qualifications

• Willingness to step into the unknown
• A certain level of comfort with interpersonal communications with strangers would be helpful for the interviews, though this is a skill that can be developed
• A desire to carefully ask great questions and probe potentially difficult emotional territories to elicit deep and powerful answers that can create true change in medical care
• Awareness of non-verbal cues and the ability to interpret them as a secondary data source
• The ability to use questions to shift the focus of a discussion toward desired goals while maintaining interviewee’s attention
• Ability to work unsupervised, ask questions, set goals, and meet deadlines
• Available for two weekly meetings: a weekly Monday/Tuesday meeting will set out the week’s opportunities and a Thursday meeting will review progress. This specific schedule can be altered, but the basic principle of a planning meeting and a results meeting should be expected.  Externs will not be expected to commit more than 10 hours per week.

Your application must include a current CV and a cover letter describing why this internship is relevant to your career goals.