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.
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.
