High school students have a rich research output, and are eager to start their own businesses–but there’s little infrastructure to support them along the journey from poster to product.
Whenever you’re using a plastic eye dropper bottle, you’re contributing to hundreds of tonnes of plastic waste per year–and risking a potentially life-threatening eye infection.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
UV-C light is an attainable and effective disinfectant that allows patients and doctors to clean and reuse eye dropper bottles and other ophthalmic equipment safely. I know this because, despite still being in high school, I’ve been conducting preliminary laboratory research on UV-C light and ophthalmic equipment under the guidance of my mentor at Stanford University for the past four years. Our results were not only satisfactory but promising. Yet, after submitting for publication and presenting our findings at conferences, we met a familiar but unsettling question: What’s next?
For millions of high school students conducting research each year in the United States, this is typically the end of the road. After months and years of working with mentors, collecting data, making posters, and writing abstracts, going to conferences and presenting findings–after all that, most research conducted by high schoolers never morphs into an actual, commercially viable product. That’s despite the palpable appetite for entrepreneurship among young people–more than ever, kids my age want to innovate. And yet, without the resources to move from poster to product, we leave a vast potential segment for innovation stranded in the “Valley of Death,” the harsh gap between a promising scientific discovery and a commercially viable product.
In the case of our ophthalmic disinfectant, my mentor and I eventually made it through the “Valley of Death,” though not without having to overcome a mound of obstacles along the way. Many of these difficulties were due to my inexperience: I had never pitched a product to hospitals and clinics before, nor did I have any foundation on how to improve search engine optimization for our website. And yet I was lucky: I had an outstanding mentor who not only had the institutional backing of Stanford University, but also showed patience and flexibility in challenging me to learn what I didn’t know. Paired with my own discipline and humility, we were able to overcome many of these obstacles. Today, I can call myself the proud founding team member of DropMate Inc., a patent-published and FDA-cleared device now being adopted in leading hospitals to reduce infection risk and medical waste for over 100 million eye exams each year.
I’m not the only one. Young people are starting companies, planting the seeds for future unicorns from their parents’ basements or their high school’s laboratories. Stockholm-based Oliver Edholm founded his first start-up, Depict, at only 17, together with Anton Osika–who went on to bring AI platform Lovable to unicorn status earlier this year. And yet those stories are still the exception. Some three-quarters of high school studentshave the desire to start their own business one day–though only 1.4% actually do so within three years of graduating high school. Why is there such a disparity in these numbers?
It’s not that high school students aren’t generating the kind of breakthrough research that could be the foundation for an innovative product. Every year, millions of students in the United States, including myself, conduct original scientific research through school-based or independent research projects, with tens of thousands presenting at regional and state conferences. At the most prestigious level, roughly 2,000 projects advance to Regeneron ISEF and the Regeneron Science Talent Search (STS), respectively, where students present posters that showcase years of original research. But these science fairs, even for award winners, are typically the end of the road.
Logically, the next step after scientific discovery should be developing a therapy, a device, a program, or a methodology to make that discovery more broadly accessible. But how to do any of that typically isn’t on the curriculum. While virtually every public school in the United States is required to teach science, few instruct students in the art of designing a product, navigating regulations, and marketing to consumers. That’s particularly true for research in the medical device space, where innovation is typically reserved for institutions that can afford lawyers, patents, publications, and commercialization.
The first step to helping high school students become the next generation of innovators is acknowledging this gap. Then we need to close it–by expanding research curricula across schools to include business know-how, design thinking, and prototyping. At my own school, I approached the teacher for our school’s Independent Science Research course to advocate for a shift from research-only toward a course that combines discovery and innovation. Two weeks later, we had a serial co-founder come speak at our school and lead a workshop on design thinking–an incredibly thought-provoking experience.
Next, we should replicate the rich ecosystem of incubators and accelerators that exist on the college level and for older entrepreneurs by making it accessible to high schoolers. At the university level, such programs help stomach the cost of early development while connecting students with viable mentors and potential investors. For high school students, similar programs do exist–like the Young Founders Lab–but there’s just not nearly enough of them.
At scientific conferences and fairs around the country, I have seen some of the most innovative, most original, and most responsible scientists–and they’re not even 18 years old. If given the resources, they can move their research from a science lab to a patient’s bedside, traversing the “Valley of Death” with innovations that leave a mark.