The Entrepreneurial Aspect of Technology

Commercialization-The concept of entrepreneurship is extremely broad. I try to separate

several dimensions, or categorize it into three basic groups. The groups are small

business, family business, and technology commercialization. Small business management is

about a person starting or operating a business that is not intended to experience very

rapid growth, but rather to provide products or services on a small scale. These are

frequently also referred to as mom-and-pop operations. Certainly managing a mom-and-pop

business involves entrepreneurship – there’s no doubt about that; it’s an entrepreneurial

act. However, the kinds of problems that mom-and-pops face are very different from those of

family businesses, where the organization is trying to employ family members and balance

out (usually) a very large number of social and emotional issues. And both of those (small

businesses and family businesses) are quite a bit different from a situation in which an

entrepreneur is trying to take a raw technology and make a commercially viable new product

or service that nobody’s ever seen before. So I try to separate entrepreneurship into those

three broad categories and talk about them separately, because the issues involved are

quite different.

Technology commercialization. What I mean by that is taking fundamental, basic research

done at research universities and converting it into viable products and services. So what

I talk about to entrepreneurs is the process of taking what I think of as potential

solutions to problems (that being the research that’s done in universities), and the actual

problems themselves (problems that people face in their day-to-day lives, or problems that

need resolution in one form or another), and bringing those two together. Very often

problems exist, and solutions exist for those problems, but the people who have the

problems don’t know any of the people who have the solutions. I look at this in a broad way

as a knowledge management concern – bringing together people with problems and people with

solutions and trying to find matches between those two. To me, that’s the key to the

technology commercialization process, and it often leads to business start-ups. My primary

emphasis is on technology commercialization, that’s my starting point and that’s the

approach I take.

From there, I would usually discuss ways of sharing problems and solutions, and then about

the fundamental business planning that goes behind a technology commercialization. Once you

have a match between a problem and a solution, you would move more into the business

planning arena. The business planning process poses questions about what costs are

involved, and what resources are needed, and also considers the competition and markets and

those things external to the start-up.

The planning process is very important, and tends to get a lot of coverage in teaching.

However, at first blush, especially in technology commercialization projects, I try to get

people not to worry too much about how big the market is and how much things cost, and all

that. Those are problems to be resolved in the planning process, and you may well find out

when you put the meat on your plan that there really isn’t very much there, and the idea

isn’t really worth pursuing. But in this sort of open-ended problem and solution/resolution

discussion, you don’t want to think about that yet. Too many good ideas are never developed

because people don’t give them a chance, and don’t try hard enough to find solutions to the

problems that commercialization presents.