Your researchers know the science. Building the company is the part nobody owns.
Institutions fund a great deal of research that could support a company, and most of it never becomes one. The gap is rarely the science. It is that turning a result into a venture asks a different set of questions, on a different timeline, of people whose training and incentives point somewhere else entirely.
Commercialization fails for the same reason startups do. Product, technology, market and capital are one system, and inside an institution there is usually nobody whose job is to work them together.
Two questions an institution cannot answer internally.
Technology transfer offices are built for disclosure, protection and licensing, and they do that well. Neither that function nor the lab that produced the work is set up to answer what comes after it.
- The builder's question
Can this be built as a product, and will it hold outside the lab?
- The investor's question
Will investors believe this becomes a company that matters?
What the engagement covers.
Can this research become a company?
- 01
Commercial thesis
Which problem the research actually solves, for whom, and whether those people would pay to have it solved.
- 02
Wedge selection
Research usually supports several plausible applications. One of them is a company. The work is deciding which, and saying so plainly.
- 03
Founder and team formation
Whether the principal investigator leads it, whether the company needs a chief executive from outside, and who holds founder-market fit for this particular problem.
- 04
Lab to product
The path from research-grade work to something that can be deployed, maintained and supported by people who did not write it.
- 05
Funding sequence
Which non-dilutive funding carries the work through the next stage, and the point at which equity becomes the right instrument rather than the default one.
- 06
Venture or licence
A direct read on whether this is a venture-scale company or a licensing play, reached before anyone commits to the harder of the two.
Funded by the grant, not the founder.
There is usually no company yet, and so no company budget. The engagement is scoped to be payable from the translational, commercialization or industry partnership funding the research already carries, and we will work with the office that administers it to fit the scope to what the award allows.
Not everything should spin out.
A good deal of excellent research is worth licensing and not worth incorporating, and the cost of learning that after a company exists is measured in years of a researcher's career. We will tell you which one you have. If the answer is that there is no company here, that is the finding, and it is worth more than an encouraging one.
Thirty minutes with the researchers, the commercialization office, or both. Tell us what the work is and we will tell you what we would examine first.
Book a 30-minute call