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Dear readers:
My wife and I are leaving early tomorrow for a ten day trip to Alaska, so I may be absent for a bit. But I will be back.
This week I'd like to react to some of the threaded discussions that have followed my earlier blogs. In particular, there were some interesting comments in the threaded discussion that followed the blog referenced above.
A couple of reactions:
For five years I served as the director of a technology business incubator. Occasionally someone would show up in my office brimming over with enthusiasm for their good idea (generally neither patented nor patentable), and they would ask how they could collect their reward. I'd gently respond that a good idea is a starting point, but rewards generally only come after someone invests the time, energy and funds to convert the idea into a product or service that customers would pay for and to build a business that could get the product or service to market.
(You might think that patenting avoids all these headaches, but even after a patent is granted, someone has to invest time, energy and funds in marketing the patent to potential licensees. One successful company in the incubator licensed a technology from an IBM inventor for about $500K and then spent several million dollars and a number of years pursuing licensees. Happily they were eventually successful in landing a major Japanese company and it turned out to be a big success.)
This hard reality is why often success comes from creating a team to commercialize the innovation -- whether in a corporate venture or a start up venture. So the technical innovator teams up with an entrepreneur (someone who has similar energy and creativity but applied to building a business rather than a technology.)
In fact before I became incubator director, I was a co-founder of an innovative, technology-driven company that was one of the first companies in the incubator. We had some modest success but were constrained by the weakness of the team -- strong on technology but naive about business.
As a result of that experience, I submitted a short essay during the hiring process for the incubator director that discussed the value of bringing together "technical entrepreneurs" and "business entrepreneurs" who could work together to build both the technology and the business.
It's common to hear the following answer to the question: "For investors, what are the five most important factors in deciding whether to invest in a new venture?"
Answer:
1. The team
2. The team
3. The team
4. The team
5. The attractiveness of the opportunity -- i.e. the fit between the market and the product / service.
So if you aren't getting the support you think you deserve, you might want to consider linking up with someone who has a successful track record of getting support from investors (or if you are working inside a company, from senior managers).
Best wishes.
Mark
P.S Last week I ran an innovation workshop for a billion dollar company and it was both fascinating and frustrating to see and hear all the conflict related to operational excellence (doing the same old stuff) vs. the drive for innovation.
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Re: Where do good ideas come from -- REVISITED
