Margriet Drouillon

Dr. ir. Margriet Drouillon, MBA is a senior business developer (IOF) at Ghent University and acts as Chief Business Officer for the BLUEGent consortium (R&D activities of the University in the field of Aquaculture and Blue Life Sciences). She oversees the commercialization of new research findings to marketable technologies and products in close collaboration with faculty members and senior researchers. This involves i.a.:

• Managing the portfolio of collaborations between academic and industrial partners;
• Building a strategic patent portfolio;
• Setting out priorities and securing funding for application- and commercialization-based R&D - university funding and funding from grant awarding bodies e.g. EU, VLAIO,…

Dr. ir. Margriet Drouillon, MBA has more than 10 years of experience in life sciences technology transfer, more specifically in the fields of aquaculture, renewables, biobased economy and bioproducts (industrial biotechnology, biocatalysis, green chemistry). She engineered several strategic alliances, research collaborations and licensing deals with industrial partners and was actively involved in the pre-seed and startup phases of several spin-off companies. This involved i.a.:

• Building a customer portfolio;
• Finding investors;
• Working out business cases;
• Giving informal and formal presentations for potential investors;
• Setting out the priorities and securing funding for R&D of startups.

She obtained her PhD at the Catholic University of Leuven and her Executive MBA at Vlerick Business School.