Interview with Eva Ratti, founder of Find Your Doctor
October 14, 2021
Interview with Eva Ratti, founder of Find Your Doctor, the innovative platform that puts in touch researchers with companies.
Research is undoubtedly an important aspect of the economic and cultural framework in Italy, as shown by the countless renowned Italian researchers that operate in every field and sector imaginable. However, many companies and institutions aren’t keen on investing in these brilliant minds, which usually leads to the “brain drain” phenomenon. This is why Find Your Doctor took on the challenge: the goal is to encourage communication between researchers and companies that are willing to renew themselves.
What is Find Your Doctor?
Find Your Doctor’s platform allows companies to connect with the best qualified researchers. The platform is mainly targeted toward:
- PMI: to reinforce its potential for innovation
- Innovative businesses: to help them meet with young researchers
- Big companies: to help them find suitable profiles
- Organisations: to bring capable individuals and expertise into the third sector and public administration
- Universities: to keep talent in high regard
Find Your Doctor helps users find new collaborators among thousands of researchers registered on the platform, in an effort to revalue the work of highly knowledgeable, innovative and productive professionals.
Let’s hear about it from Eva Ratti, co-founder of Find Your Doctor!
Hi Eva, nice to meet you, and thank you for your time. Find Your Doctor: can you tell us more about it?
We thank you for your interest! Describing Find Your Doctor in a few words is pretty challenging. It’s a complex project that tackles the same two-faced issue on multiple fronts: the lack of interaction between academia and business. Companies progressively seek to renovate their methods and products in order to keep up with the competition, but they fail at directly communicating with universities. The interaction is therefore very limited. On the other side there are those Ph.D graduates that start cooperating with their research peers but still aren’t able to enter the academy. They then try setting foot into the workforce, a world they don’t know, and that doesn’t know them in return. Find Your Doctor supports both parties: we’re an employment and (soon) training agency that helps businesses find the most suitable researchers for their needs, and we also help researchers realize and act upon their market potential. The worth of a university is measured based on its students. By focusing on the integration of the researcher on the market, we promote the transfer of knowledge toward businesses and the society in a structured way, and a new relationship between the two cultures – research and business – that gradually grows as the professional path of the academy develops in an extra-universitary context.
How and when was the idea born?
It was 2013, the year I got my Ph.D at the University of Amsterdam. I decided to go back to Italy, but I wasn’t able to continue my studies here with my Ph.D in Astrophysics. So I tried my luck searching for an occupation at various employment agencies, but no one was managing “high” profiles such as mine. I therefore talked to my friend Gualtiero Cortellini, who I knew just founded a business Consortium for technology transfer. I asked him if he knew someone that could be interested in an astrophysicist with good communication and creative skills. He did not, but he told me about how small businesses struggle with the research and development aspect, and also about the Consortium’s own struggles to reach its goals. That’s when I suggested a change in strategy: “What if it were the people who came into contact, instead of the institutions? I can’t be the only Ph.D graduate that doesn’t know what to do with their life!”. And that’s when it started…
How long did it take for you to create and launch the platform?
In 2014 I figured out whether my case represented a generalized problem in the system. The issue of the employability of researchers was indeed recognized by the institutions: the EU had already commissioned many studies that could track the Ph.D graduates’ career paths and establish them on the market, since they were considered a crucial asset for the Union’s economic goals. Determining the demand on part of the businesses for said researchers was hard, since we were facing a cultural gap in which the research path was rather unknown in Italy. We didn’t have competitors or benchmarks, but, after a process of data gathering and interviews, the Find Your Doctor project finally saw the light thanks to the Consorzio per il Trasferimento Tecnologico C2T. In 2015 we collaborated with API Lecco to create our first service, Sportello Doc. We started experimenting with companies and recruiting the first researchers through a first version of the web portal. The platform was a rushed draft that I worked on myself for a few days, but, still, we managed to attract researchers and companies alike. Our client base started growing steadily. In 2017 we officially became an innovative start-up, with me and Gualtiero as co-founders. We also became an employment agency, while soon enough we’ll be offering training as well. To this day, we amassed more than 6.000 registered researchers on the site, compared to the 250 in 2015. We even have a presence on social media. Apart from companies and organisations, we’re working with many universities toward preparing young Ph.D graduates to enter the market, and we teach them to enhance their know-how. Basically, it took us one week to launch the platform, but it’s still distant from its final version. We’ve got a great potential in our hands, and we’d like to make use of it all without limitations!
Why should an organisation choose Find Your Doctor? And why is it so important to focus on the researchers?
The reasons can be many: the organisation might have an interesting idea, but it may not feel like investing in it; or there could be an unusual problem that can’t be solved by the employed technicians, but such a problem isn’t worth getting the university involved; or the organisation might have a clear project in mind, but there’s the need of finding a specialized consultant that can offer the required expertise. Moreover, there could be the need to train the current employees with the help of a professional, who knows everything about the topic at hand. I’m talking about technology, but also human resources, business management, marketing strategies… Human resources researchers have lots to offer under these aspects, even though companies still don’t feel the urge to employ them. Companies could simply employ these talented, creative and quick-learning individuals who are already well-trained in solving complex issues. Researchers can solve problems with their out-of-the-box thinking and their rigorous methods and tools. They’re skilled at selecting only important information, and they can interact with institutions abroad. Of course, not all researchers are extremely good at everything, but their path of studies can definitely shape them into becoming great. They’ll also gain lots of useful transversal skills. A good researcher is knowledgeable, autonomous, resilient, tech-savvy, open to change. Most importantly, he/she’ll know if a certain issue deserves to be reviewed by the academic world: communicating with the academy will feel more natural to the researcher, compared to the companies.
How’s the market responding so far?
On part of the researchers our effort is widely appreciated, not only for the job offers we provide, but especially for the training aspect, where we teach them how to seamlessly transition into the workforce. They trust us, because no one ever tackled this issue head on before, and they know we ourselves have been there. Market-wise, we struggled with establishing our business model and target audience, but the success-rate with our clients pushes us to experiment further. Big companies are interested in the training side, while small businesses mainly ask us for consulting (due to the fact that Consorzio C2T is specialized in subsidized finance instruments for the R&D), although start-ups and tech companies are also interested in hiring; we were even asked to build a team of technicians for a start-up from the ground up. All things considered, our offer is pretty unusual, but the most visionary entrepreneurs often realize our potential. Sometimes we get confusing demands from some clients, but we’re learning how to avoid sketchy situations. After all, the search for collaborators is always a bet, and, although we always manage to find a specialized consultant, arranging recruitments is always the hardest part. Nevertheless, our successes outweigh the failures, and we’re having the typical start-up scale up problem: too much demand, too little internal resources. Therefore I’ll say that yes, the market’s response has generally been great.
How did you launch your project? Did you resort to a crowdfunding campaign?
Negative. Find Your Doctor was entirely built with the help of Consorzio C2T, after being greenlit by my partner Gualtiero, manager of Consorzio C2T and CEO of FYD. From there, we saw steady and sustainable growth. Right now, we’d like to accelerate the process, since demand and our visibility grew so much. We definitely need more people and automation, but we’re still evaluating how to proceed.
Is Find Your Doctor targeted toward the international market as well? And what about your future projects?
Our primary goal was to establish Find Your Doctor in Europe. We still have a long way to go to achieve that, but we will for sure. The concept of “researcher” is somewhat niche, said individual needs to move around a lot, so we want to expand the area in which he/she can find a satisfactory professional match. FYD’s method is especially good when it comes to this: we operate on a national scale through the Internet by creating interconnections between universities that allow us to find the required professional from any location, even abroad. As for the future, we have many ambitious projects. Market-wise, our short-term goal is to strengthen and standardize on-the-job training, on which we’re currently experimenting. We also need the resources to automate the processes, so that we can expand on the number of sectors that are willing to take in our researchers. Moreover, we want to focus on dissemination and awareness-raising activities on the web, to support researchers and make them express themselves. The tragedy of the last year and a half showed us the true impact of scientific communication in our time, and it highlighted how inadequate the current systems are. We could work on improving this, too.
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