Technology Valley of Death Crystallized

In a previous post we talked about the technology fire hose – the exponential growth of new innovations available, growing in larger array of fields that can be applied to a growing set of opportunities. In this post we also stated that a serious deficiency may have struck the economic innovation engine. With this post we would like to crystallize the problem taking examples from our experiences.

In the Mid-South innovation community, we have found that the total amount of research conducted is well over a billion dollars each year-- depending on the boundary you strike, it would be over three billion. By some measures this should equate to 100 to 200 or even 300 patent applications and based upon these patent applications there should be in upwards of 5 to 15 new business ventures started each year with these technologies. The problem is the region is not seeing the start-ups. It appears there is a deal flow problem and we don't attribute it to lack of money to support the deals. We attribute it to human capital. Who is supposed to actively bridge the gap between the raw technologies to a market application?

Q. Is it the responsibility of the researchers to create "start-up" new business ventures?
A. The vast majority of researchers lack entrepreneurial confidence, time, and experience. They don't actively seek people with expertise; instead they rely on tech transfer process of universities, government, or corporate to swing into motion.

Q. Is it the responsibility of angel investors?
A. Angel investors do not create deals and they generally do not want to be first money on the table for a seed stage venture. They are passive investors generally waiting for the deals to find them.

Q. Is it the responsibility of the venture capitalists?
A. Typical venture capital fund structure cannot support the opportunity. They are looking for preexisting deals that have generally proven they don't need the money for venture creation; the growing business concern needs VC money for scaling.

Q. Is the responsibility of technology transfer officers?
A. It is hard enough for a cash strapped technology transfer team to protect intellectual property, let alone market technologies actively. Furthermore the teams generally barely have enough time to manage IP disclosures and IP protection.

I think we can all agree that R&D Engines are generating sufficient raw technology candidates, yet these do not advance to applied business applications or new ventures in the incubation stage. This phenomena is has been termed as the "technology valley of death." This chasm is not crossed often – in the Mid-South we have only a handful of examples available over the past 10 years.

Passivity is not working well for most R&D engines. The new winners will be those who actively survey the landscape and take advantage of technology maven networks. The new winners will create the deals.

So now the question to be answered is who will fulfill the need and what will be their model for success. Please comment or provide further insights.

Inventions to Innovations

I was recently reviewing some talking points from a talk Steve Jurvetson gave in May 2003 in Memphis, Tennessee. Steve stated more or less that we view the future as a linear continuation of the past, but we can not view technological innovation as a movement in a straight line. He further stated that technology advances exponentially, moving quicker and quicker, impacting a wider and wider array of fields. No disputing this, but how has the bridge from theory to practice kept pace?

I don't think it has. The process of taking inventions to new business applications has to rapidly change. Passive technology deal creation is not working today. This may be because what used to be a technology spicket has turned into a fire hose -- the growing volume of technologies flying out of the research labs ever faster. I would argue that while the number of technologies developed each year has vastly increased, application of these technologies to real world problems has not kept pace. This is likely due to a passivity and/or the need for a new mode of technology transfer, commercialization, and venture creation. Active innovation networks and active deal creation, I believe will be the best method moving forward.

Call it Creation Nets, Open Innovation,Venture Creation, Innovation Connection, or whatever -- it is just the way technology venture development will need to shift to keep pace with the exponential advancement of technologies.

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Published as written at ericmathews.blogspot.com:
http://ericmathews.blogspot.com/2006/12/technology-transfer-keeping-pace.html

Power to the People . . . Definitely . . .

I recently read a post on InformationWeek speaking to the power users currently have. View that blog post by J. Nicholas Hoover here. I posted a comment . . . But here is the meat of it.

A look at the modern desktop shows that the modern worker has the power to personalize. They have their chat windows up, desktops laid out as they wish, gadgets selected and downloaded, favorite sites bookmarked, and internet homepages set for their browsers. It would be hard to find identical desktops.

Extending that to the Web 2.0 era, we find that the personalized start pages that fell out of favor with the 'bubble burst' are now back and more powerful. Web 2.0 start-ups like NetVibes are giving the power to the people on this front.

The latest trend is coming with the enterprise adoption of social networking tools in the workplace. See our post from last month on Intel's social networking roll out here. Social networking decentralizes power on many levels.

Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief speaking at Cisco's analyst conference is spot on: "One size does not fit all. You cannot serve all the interests of all the employees with one policy." From a look at the modern workplace computer, it seems for the most part the modern IT department implicitly agrees. We will see how that changes.