A smarter Harvard marketplace
From creating micro-robots to designing a lung on a chip, Harvard researchers perform some of the most complicated and cutting-edge work in the world. But until recently, the process of procuring the tools for such research — say, an obscure antibody needed to replicate another lab’s study — was far from an exact science. “From what I’ve heard, people mostly relied on Googling and a lot of word of mouth,” said Joel Rivera-Cardona, manager of procurement services at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Luckily for Rivera-Cardona, the Wyss Institute was among the first organizations at Harvard to test the Harvard Crimson Online Marketplace (HCOM), a new procurement system designed as a one-stop shop for purchasing and invoicing anything from office chairs to contractor services to rare biological materials like those pesky antibodies. “There are some good vendors out there [for scientific materials], but one vendor’s not going to carry everything you...