Objective: A need to identify and build a comprehensive database to help identify seasoned investors to help build the AZ early stage bioscience investment ecosystem.

Constructing an Arizona Bioscience Dealmaker Network: A Proposal to Support BioAccel ‘s Initiative to Build Out the Investment Ecosystem

CommonWeal, LLC of Chapel Hill, North Carolina is pleased to submit this work statement to BioAccel to support its on-going early stage funding and bio-business mentoring mission as well as the specific objectives associated with its Regional Innovation Strategies program grant.   The basis and driver for the overall approach is the Dealmaker proprietary analytical engine developed by CommonWeal to deliver detailed insight into the dynamics of entrepreneur, investor, and company networks that power new value creation within economies.  

The Dealmaker framework is based on the concept that networks of serial entrepreneurs, investors and their affiliated companies play a critical role in driving value creation and shaping the character of robust regional economies.  Firm and company level information identifying the actors and their connective relationships can provide a new window into the innovation dynamics within a regional economy as a whole and just as importantly into the entrepreneurial behavior, investor focus and innovation hot spots within specific industry sectors and sectors.

Within the CommonWeal approach “Dealmakers” are actors who have founded, managed or invested in multiple private entrepreneurial firms, and hold concurrent equity ties to multiple firms as a consequence of their serving on the boards as advisors, investors or managers of these firms.  They are specifically defined as those individuals who have three or more concurrent equity positions in private entrepreneurial firms as a consequence of their entrepreneurial or investment activities. Generally, by virtue of their experience, the most facile and active entrepreneurs and investors are considered Dealmakers.

Dealmaker analytical engine output is drawn primarily from the Capital IQ database, a private database maintained and licensed by Standard & Poor, that provides quantitative research data and analysis applications to over 4,200 investment management firms, private equity funds, investment banks, advisory firms, corporations, and universities. This unique private dataset maintains detailed records about private firms, their managements, and their boards of directors based on data submitted by the companies at incorporation and through the shelf registration process, and made available to licensees on a current snapshot basis. As a general rule, firms that have received some form of “formal” outside investment will be captured within this database.

As described below, this CommonWeal Dealmaker work plan for BioAccel is defined by three major tasks.

1. The Dealmaker Foundation Database:  Constructing an Arizona-wide bioscience industry entrepreneur, investor and company database

2. The Arizona Dealmaker Network:  Identifying and analyzing the firm-to-firm (Dealmaker) network currently in play within Arizona’s bioscience sector by pinpointing that subset of serial entrepreneurs, investors and their associated firms that drive value creation and then mapping the social capital relationships among these various actors

3. Customized Investment Ecosystem Support:  Developing, in concert with BioAccel, a Dealmaker-based Investment Ecosystem Toolkit to support both the BioAccel’s on-going early stage funding and bio-business mentoring mission as well as the specific objectives associated with its Regional Innovation Strategies program grant.