By Nathan Rubbelke, St. Louis Business Journal | September 29,2020
Local innovation hub BioSTL is moving forward with plans to bolster its international recruitment and workforce development efforts.
The nonprofit organization is expanding its headcount with newly created roles aimed at formalizing its workforce development strategy and expanding its ability to recruit companies to St. Louis.
BioSTL is currently hiring for two new roles – an ag-food business development director and health care business development director – for its international recruitment arm, GlobalSTL. Since its launch in 2014, GlobalSTL has lured global companies to the region from several sectors, but notched its biggest successes in the health care and agriculture markets.
“Those are the areas where we really want to beef up our bandwidth. Because of our very small bandwidth, we have accomplished great things. But we feel like we’ve left a lot of opportunity on the table because of our just limited capacity to follow up on opportunities we’ve unearthed in various parts of the world,” said Donn Rubin, president and CEO of BioSTL.
GlobalSTL currently has four employees, plus a consultant. Its recruitment strategy involves selling St. Louis’ clusters of health care and agriculture technology companies as potential customers to maturing global technology companies. In that process, GlobalSTL acts as a deal conduit, finding and facilitating meetings with established companies around the world and the St. Louis-area’s major corporate players. BioSTL says that while the hands-on process of connecting startups and the corporations has yielded several successful partnerships, the time-consuming aspect has held it back from pursuing some deals.
“We kept finding ourselves spread too thin to really do justice to both sides. We were missing opportunities to get things across the finish line. Even though we were successful, we were seeing missed opportunities,” said Vijay Chauhan, GlobalSTL lead at BioSTL.
Chauhan said increasing GlobalSTL's staff will allow it to shepherd more ambitious partnerships between startups and local corporations as well as advance other projects. For example, the new ag-food business development director will also have responsibility for helping build out BioSTL’s Early Adopter Grower Innovation Community (EAGIC), which rolled out last year and is under GlobalSTL’s umbrella.
In addition to the expansion of GlobalSTL, BioSTL is also hiring for a newly created role of director of regional workforce strategy, a position that focuses on establishing a workforce development plan for cultivating bioscience talent.
“This role really will exist to develop, own and implement a multiyear strategy for the region’s bioscience ecosystem,” said Ben Johnson, BioSTL’s vice president of programs.
Rubin said all three of the new roles being pursued by BioSTL were budgeted for 2020, but that the organization put a pause on hiring for them at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has halted some of BioSTL’s operations — such as travel for its GlobalSTL arm — Rubin said the organization has pivoted operations to fit the virtual world.
“What we have seen is momentum has not slowed,” he said.
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