What's your Appetite for Pain?
So you think you're ready to run a business? How much appetite for pain do you have?
The underlying assumption for many innovators is that they should take their innovation to a market which will recognise its value and generate financial rewards. The sad truth is that most do not make it. Running a business is the antithesis of being an innovator – creativity is stifled. Most innovators are not cut out to run businesses, and many, without a feet-on-the-ground business CEO to keep them realistic, lose their company, their idea and even their marriage.
Unwary innovators face the stresses of losing much control of their company for relatively little funding by going the venture capital route; others face losing control of their intellectual property or their flexibility by allowing themselves to be too tightly locked in to a large systems integrator. They are likely to find corporate end users impregnable, time consuming and frustrating. Others go bankrupt because of the expensive and cumbersome process to the corporates.
As one innovator says: “You are likely to experience issues with lack of funding, procurement ethics, government politics, old boys networks, resistance to chances, new ideas and new people in the field, academic arrogance and idea theft, large company SME “brain sucks”, and European investor attitudes – and all that just for starters.”
The key question therefore that innovators must ask themselves right from the start which route they should take: to market and develop their technology as a business; or simply to sell the IPR to preserve the technology, and continue developing fresh technology.
For those innovators still determined to persevere we provide practical base-level guidance, grounded in hard practical experience, help with some of the basic and also some of the less obvious pitfalls, and practical examples.
