by Sheridan Winn

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have your invention: What do you do now? You learn about entrepreneurship. Invention and entrepreneurship go hand in hand.

Ken Zolot believes there are four essential steps to success. He leads the innovation teams at MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Groups of graduate students—i-Teams—collaborate with MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center and research labs, along with mentors from the business community, to create startup businesses with their inventions.
“The first step is to understand the technology,” says Zolot. “Assess how your invention works and whether it is better than anything already in the marketplace. Look at the advantages and the risks.”

Next, examine the market opportunities and quantify the value proposition.

Zolot asks his students, “Who cares?” It’s not a flip question.
“You need to know why and how your product will be of interest to someone,” he says. “How will people ascribe value to what you have invented?” Look at the size and nature of the market, he advises, and how you will reach it. The perfect golf club for left-handed 70-year-old players, he suggests, would probably face a limited market.

Your invention may have more than one market. You may have a new type of material that will make attractive, durable clothing for the fashion industry. The same material might also be used as the skin of airplane, to improve weight and fuel efficiency; a coating to create a lightweight golf club; or even an artery liner, to go in someone’s heart. “You may have four different industries,” says Zolot. “If all of them ‘care,’ be aware that each market requires a different approach.”

Be mindful when approaching a company that owns a lot of patents, warns Neal Thornberry, associate professor of management at Babson Executive Education. Organizations may tout themselves as innovative in their annual reports, but the real question is, How many of their patents make it to market? “I would be much less interested in a company with 100 patents, of which two are commercialized, than a company which has five patents and all commercialized,” advises Thornberry.

Zolot’s third step to success is intellectual property. This stage might precede market assessment, but not necessarily. Writing a patent requires an understanding of where and how new technology goes: A patent that describes a new way of building a golf club differs from one describing a basic material with any number of applications. “You may first need to know your market,” says Zolot.
Establish what is already patented in your field and find out if you have the legal freedom to operate; you may have developed a new way to do something that is already patented. Novel and useful it may be, but you will still have to work with the owners of the original patent. “Can you build a wall of patents that extends what you own and gives you access to potential new ones?” says Zolot.

His fourth step is human capital: Find out who is doing work like yours and who you want to talk to. Who do you need on your team and scientific advisory board? Who are your ideal investors, partners or collaborators?
“No one does this alone,” says Zolot. “The best person to market your new golf-club material might be a well-known golf professional, not a scientist.”

The path from the lab to the world is not always clear. There are times, Zolot says, when you have to take what would appear to be the “wrong” path in order to first establish your credibility.

What else will you need? Resilience is essential. “You have to knock on a lot of doors to get attention—and people will call your baby ugly,” says Thornberry. “Don’t lose the passion. Don’t lose the creativity and the excitement—but balance them with discipline. And be honest: If you are not the person to commercialize your idea, then look for people who can do it better than you. A lot of good innovations get lost because of weak entrepreneurship.”
Sheridan Winn is a freelance business and lifestyle journalist based in the UK. Her insightful and entertaining features are published regularly in newspapers and journals on four continents.