Dr. Kaplan speaking about nematode pheromones at the University of Bern

Dr. Fatma Kaplan, CEO of Pheronym is honored to be an invited speaker by the Institute of Plant Sciences at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Thank you Prof. Dr. Christelle Robert for this opportunity to talk about “Pheromones’ role in entomopathogenic nematode dispersal and foraging on earth and in Space”.

We had a great discussion after the presentation with great questions.

March 8, 2021, at 7:15 AM Pacific Time (4:15 pm in Switzerland).

 

 

Expanding Customer Interviews with Master of Business and Science Students at KGI

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The insight we gained from conducting 130 interviews in the agriculture ecosystem for the National NSF I-corps team program and the NSF Beat-the-Odds boot camp was priceless. We learned about our customers’ needs and were able to develop a strategy to focus our product development efforts on specific customers, market segments, and pests. We learned how to address the farmer’s needs, and identify key partners, resources, and more. Despite our 130 interviews, only 55 of them were growers. That is because August and September are the peak harvest time. The farmers were not available to take our calls because they were out in the fields. We wanted to continue our customer discovery and interview more farmers when they were less busy. Luckily, we had the opportunity to sponsor a class project at the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) Master of Business and Science (MBS) program in Fall 2020. We thought since the harvest is over, farmers would have time to talk to us and with the students’ help, we could interview more farmers. Keep reading to discover what we found.

Pheronym is among the top 20 promising companies

Pheronym is among the top 20 promising companies developing the future of farming technology, selected by C&EN by ACS in the Q4 2020 Discovery report “Feeding the world”.

The report can be downloaded at www.acs.org/discoveryreports

It was mailed to members with the November 30 issue of C&EN. By the end of February/early March 2021 the report will be posted online, open access to all.