Trust the process. Start from the beginning… Don’t start at Step 6!
Turning cool technology into innovation requires getting that tech into the world and used. Cool tech that sits on the shelf is a pointless waste of time, money, and your own brilliance. So how can you increase the odds that your tech will make it over the hump and get commercialized?
Whether you’re a startup founder, a seasoned entrepreneur, or a tech enthusiast with a game-changing idea, understanding how to navigate the path to commercialization is crucial. Let’s dispense with the obvious – you either became aware of a problem and came up with a solution you think works, or you created cool tech and are now looking for a problem to solve with it.
Many people tout a 10-step method to commercialize tech, yet for the most part, they come across as suspiciously linear and sequential. That is highly unlikely to be your journey to tech commercialization. Let’s take a look at Rushlight Ventures’ 10-step list (Catalytic Commercialization™) and discuss how this might work in practice. Our method is less focused on the startup path and more generic regarding the many ways one might bring tech to the market. We’ll focus on only the first five steps because those are the ones everybody is tempted to shortcut.
1. Define the Asset: What are the assets you want to commercialize? This includes pending and issued patents, know-how, trade secrets, customer/pipeline data, product pipeline, copyrights & trademarks, and proprietary relationships. Accurately (and with brutal honesty) assess technology, manufacturing, and business maturity. Starting without knowing where you are is a fool’s journey.
2. Define the Value Proposition: Consider this a first attempt the first time through. You’ll revisit this step after the next one or two. Don’t be frustrated by having to return to this step several times. If you mess this one up, you will eventually go down in flames. Substantively, this step is about product-market fit and requires many assumptions that you might think you “know,” but that will likely turn out to be untrue. Document your target use case, conduct customer/user discovery, assess product-market fit & gaps, and create profiles of the target users/customers. This step is the money shot; don’t short-change it.
3. Landscape the Asset: You have an idea of what you have and what you think you want to do with it. Test the heck out of that hypothesis. This includes market characterization, compliance and regulation analysis, competitive analysis, patent landscape/FTO, and channel analysis at a minimum. If you do this right the first time through, you might have to go back and change your value proposition or abandon your commercialization concept altogether for something completely different. There are, in fact, bad ideas, and this step is your chance to avoid executing a bad one.
4. Further Develop the Asset: Chances are good that you’ll need to advance the technical, manufacturing, and/or business readiness of your tech to test it to the level you now understand you need (before going “all in” on a path to market). What proof points do you need to demonstrate before you can get others to believe in your story? What do you have to invest (time, money, talent) to get there? Finding the line between half-baked (too soon!) and over-cooked (analysis paralysis) is not always easy.
5. Experiment as Needed: Find ways to cost-effectively test (i) value hypotheses, (ii) market/customer acceptance, (iii) strength of demand, (iv) supply chain capabilities, etc. While it would be ideal to sign pilot accounts and fulfill orders, that’s not always possible. But the closer you can get to actual field use of your tech, the better. Learning these things now, and not after a full launch, is often the difference between survival and failure.
The rest of the 10 steps are less treacherous because they more obviously need to be done:
6. Commit to Primary Path & Evaluate Overall Readiness for Execution, Identify Gaps: Nail down your go-to-market plan. Is this a startup, an out-license, an asset sale, a JV, a rollup? Identify the gaps you need to fill to get there.
7. Remediate: Plug gaps, achieve various proof milestones as needed, and extend experiments; secure needed funding.
8. Build the Right Execution Team: Whether long-term or short-term, leverage hires, 1099s, networks, partnerships, or in-house resources.
9. Select Targets: Whether you need licensees, buyers, JV partners, startup investors, or companies to buy, build your list.
10. Execute Program/Process.
In our experience, most tech commercializers want to start at step 6. DON’T. If you remember nothing else from this post, remember: DON’T START AT STEP 6.
Commercializing tech is a complex and challenging endeavor, but with careful planning, execution, and relentless determination, you can turn your ideas into innovations—successful products that make a meaningful impact in the world.
Stay focused, stay agile, and never lose sight of the problem you set out to solve. The journey may be daunting, but the rewards of seeing your tech impact the world are like no other.