Sunday, June 19, 2011

Immense Challenge or Immense Opportunity?

It's been more than six months since I am in the business of Technology Commercialization (and broadly, in Innovation Management). I have now spoken to a lot of people in the know. What comes out clearly is that though there is an immense opportunity to create value out of bridging the invention-to-market gap, yet, the market needs a lot of 'development' effort.

That effectively means is that the 'market' is not ready to accept our offerings. Every target customer (Institutions or Individuals in India who own IP/Technology, willing to take it to market) we have met has commercialization on the agenda, but it is not high enough for her to allocate a budget or engage with external parties in the know.

It certainly does not help that we are a very young organization, we don't have any major success story yet and that I don't have many grey hair. Although there is steady revenue, but we are more like scraping the the bottom than having the cream. Customers in our pipeline are painstakingly involved in filing too many patents without any thought of their value, have little clarity in what they want and are very slow to respond.

I realize that this is a typical product startup problem: the market does not exist and has to be either created or the business model should modify itself to suit the needs of the current market. Given that we were not born with the immense resource-base of a MNC needed to 'create a market', the only viable alternative seems to be to keep the business running with whatever lowest-hanging fruits we can get. The question is: do we really want to take the kind of lowest-hanging fruits we get?

Or, maybe, there is a third alternative? Another possible way to change the orbit is to create a few case-studies that could form the reference point for our future discussions with potential customers. More important than anything, it will be a validation that we are capable of making things happen and will give us something to base our future strategy on.

At this moment, I can't decide which strategy works the best. We are, simultaneously, working on new business models to broaden the base of our customers, investing in developing the market and working hard to create a case-study. Although we haven't concluded new engagements as yet, last three weeks have seen things moving for sure.

Then, things move only moved mightily when you are on a mission. I have taken on a personal target to secure my first million: closing INR 10,00,000 of business in next three months (till 14 Sep 2011). I don't know how it will happen, but I am sure it will happen! Keep watching this space! :)

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