You can learn how to connect the idea-bone to the finance-bone, and the finance-bone to the profit-bone, in Memphis at the Musculoskeletal New Ventures Conference this fall.

The conference, scheduled for Oct. 8-9 at the FedEx Technology Institute, will bring together entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, venture capitalists, patent lawyers, regulatory experts and government officials at the University of Memphis’s new facility, now still under construction.

Organized by the Memphis Biotech Foundation and the Memphis Regional Chamber, the conference is unique because it focuses on orthopedic product startups.

“It will highlight for the Memphis community itself what a tremendous opportunity the community has in the musculoskeletal field,” said Bob Compton, former president and chief operating officer of Sofamor Danek.

“Secondly, it will help local entrepreneurs get more visibility to the venture capitalists who are specializing in musculoskeletal devices.”

Entrepreneurs will also learn about how to start, finance and manage such a business.

For example, the keynote speaker is James E. Nicholson, founder of two biomedical device companies that went public. He has founded his sixth company Cortek Inc., which develops materials used to treat spine problems. This company is now generating positive cash flow, he said. He will discuss the advantages and pitfalls of using venture capital.

Inexperienced startup managers often don’t understand that their own stake in a business declines, as venture capitalists increase their stake.

“If they are successful in selling the company, if the founder and his team ends up with 15 percent of it, they’ll be lucky,” Nicholson said.

But the musculoskeletal device industry has annual sales of about $15 billion and is growing at a pace of 12 to 15 percent, Compton said.

And Memphis is one of the world’s three centers for musculoskeletal devices, Compton said. The other two are Warsaw, Ind., and southern Germany.

Joanne Goodnight, National Institutes of Health Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grant program coordinator, will also speak. The NIH awards $600 million a year in such grants, of which none went to Memphis in 2002, Compton said.

The conference will also expose Memphis’s competitive advantages in orthopedic device development to investors and others from outside the region, he said.

Compton has been receiving calls from interested venture capitalists around the country about the October conference. “They say, ‘I had no idea Memphis had all those assets in the musculoskeletal industry,'” he said.

For more information, visit this Web site: http:// www.memphisbioscience.com.

– Mark Watson: 529-5874