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Lijit Search

Dave Pollard has described a methodology for approaching a complex task that I believe may be an appropriate description of the process of commercializing an invention.  To paraphrase:

1. Identify the Customer: Determine who the customers are - how they can be reasonably segmented.  There are usually multiple customer groups, often with conflicting interests.  Expect that this will create irreconcilable expectations and priorities for you, the inventor.
2. Research & Observe: Study the status quo to understand what is really happening, what the real processes and workarounds are.  Don't judge them - understand them.
3. Converse: Have lots of iterative discussions with different customer segments to clarify your understanding of what is happening and why.  Question and challenge suppositions and implausible explanations.  An understanding of underserved and important needs and problems will start to emerge.
4. Define and Articulate the Needs & Problems: Feed these back to the customers to make sure your understanding is correct.
5. Imagine Ways of Addressing These Needs and Problems:  Now you have reached the real starting point - not preconceptions and solutions looking for problems, but qualified, articulated needs and problems with no obvious solutions.
6. Create a Future State Vision If Your Imagined Solutions Were Implemented: Tell a compelling story of how things could/would happen if the solutions you imagined were implemented.  The story becomes your business case.
7. Experiment and Prototype: Start small - your imagined solutions will never be perfect, and experiments and prototypes will allow you to refine the solution before spending all your resources on an imperfect solutions.
8. Scale Up: Expand the pilot and share it with those that share the need and appreciate the problem.  Let them own the solution.

One of the great advantages our inventor-partners have is that they are articulate consumers.  That is, they are immersed in the problems and frustrations associated with the status quo.  Consequently, they have an intuitive sense of unmet and important needs, and they have taken the step of articulating a proposed solution in the form of a prototype.  However, to take the next step towards the commercialization of their invention, inventors need to come to grips with a couple of truths:

• Effective collaboration requires shared understanding, and shared understanding means that implicit assumptions need to be made tacit and testable.  While the inferences made by the inventors during steps 1 through 6 above may seem self-evident to him, they are most likely far from obvious to a potential partner.  (We at EIP have recently started a trial program in collaboration with keydesign and Readymade to help inventors tell their stories more effectively.)
• The process is iterative.  Peeling away layers of uncertainty that surrounds a prospective innovation requires a succession of capabilities and capacities.  Each resource in the value chain needs to own the invention, and that requires that each has to go through a form of the invention process above.  When an inventor approaches EIP, she invariably feels that she's at the Scale Up stage.  We, on the other hand, want to talk first about the customer, the benefit, and evidence to support the contention that the proposed solution effectively addresses an important and unmet needs.  Likewise, when EIP prepares for a presentation to a prospective licensee, we have to remember that our counterparts at "BigCo" are going to need to retrace our steps and challenge our assumptions before they will be willing to embrace our ideas.

7:55:59 AM