As technology folks, we love research. And back to the innovation creed a little bit, and some of those behavioral assessments I mentioned that we're not covering in this course, really thinking through what makes you excited. And one thing that stunts commercialization, on the other side of that magnifying glass, is that we can see that you're really in love with research. You are an inventor. You are creative. You are in the laboratory. You don't like commercialization. You don't like, that doesn't get you excited. Doesn't get you excited to do project management or follow a gantt chart or commit to anything. If I come back next month and, and look for something that you said you'd have done, you, you, you have a lot of reasons why you didn't get them done. And they're all great reasons. And then tend to revolve around the fact that you're very interested inventing new stuff. Terms are really misused. But, but I align with the camp that says inventing is very different than innovating. Okay? Invention is a creative process. Innovating is taking something new into the marketplace and commercializing it. So inventing is research, is creative. You're going to put more bells and whistles on things. You're going to make sure things work better, add more features in. You're going to file for more patents. You're going to broaden your patent portfolio. You got very broad applications. You're going to boil the whole ocean eventually. because that's what makes you excited. But that's a great reason why people will walk away from helping you commercialize your technology. Somewhat related to a couple of the other bullet points here. you, your, your status is way behind what you tout. So again, you, you have this cause. All these problems are generally driven from wonderful things. We have a cause. We're standing for solving the, the planet's problems. And we tend to talk as if we've already done that often, right? So we have a cure for cancer. That's wonderful. When you really dig into it, what has happened is a, a certain reaction has been identified that might be prone towards indicating a certain cancerous condition. Or I've invented a cell phone that's the size of a, credit card. Well, maybe you've enabled some components that are going to be able to shrink some of the signal processing filters closer together. But you're a long ways from a transceiver that's as thin as a cell phone. So we talk bigger than we really are. And I already mentioned about project management. You know, not really interested in project management and commitment to schedules. The ninth stunting factor is a mountain of money. So, huge amount of capital is needed. We see this, for example, in the alternative energy for fuel cell cars, especially. But even for our electric vehicles. If you're going to launch a new electric vehicle company, like Tesla, right, you, you need an awful lot of money. You're going to build the whole car. You're not just building the steering wheel that's really good, and you're not just going to build a really great battery or a nice motor. You're going to build the whole car. So a huge amount of capital. Likewise, charging stations and partnerships with municipalities and, and really high level relationships with the government to help build infrastructure. So these ideas are very, very stunted because you gotta, you have to go big or go home. You need, you need hundred of millions or billions of dollars to actually be successful. So that is known as the mountain of money. One way around that is to think of a smaller increment. But if people on the other side of that magnifying glass, or you yourself as the, the innovator, can't find a smaller subset of meaningful, minimum increment, you, you can only think big. I've gotta have ten million bucks, or I'm not doing anything. Well, most people are not going to get ten million bucks out of the blocks. So what could you do with $10,000? You know, if I came back and if I gave you $10,000 or $50,000 and I came back in six months, what would you give me. And if your answer is, I, I can't do a thing with 50 grand. Well then, you're probably just going to be stuck asking for $10 million for a number of years. Unprotectable. Another challenge is, this is great, but there's no barriers to entry. So you don't have any patents or trade secrets or any kind of market traction or key beta customers, there's no regulations that are changing. So this is way too much of a free market. So people might say, I'm not interested. because even though it's good, we're not going to be able to, to really gain the traction that we need to, to have a pay back. A one-trick pony. It depends again very much on the innovation creed. Right? So if you're interested in a life style business, it's going to keep, keep you employed and happy and a few of your friends. And help, help change a small part of the world. But maybe this doesn't apply to you. But from an investable perspective, investors, senior managers, business development folks, they want to see that there's a whole application area. So, if the technology that you're thinking about and some of the ideas that come through your filter. If you're looking for something big, and you've got only a very narrow niche, maybe it's a brilliant very narrow niche, it's not going to be big enough. So, one-trick pony. Can't win in a fight? Looking at the competition, every single one of the ideas that you're thinking about is being worked on by somebody else somehow, somewhere. Not exactly, but similarly. Right. So there's always competition. There's also competition against status quo, the world is fine without your product today. Right now the world doesn't have your product. So the world is still surviving. So they're doing that somehow and you have to sell against status quo. You gotta against the surprise announcements that are going to come out in the newspaper tomorrow, that somebody's launching a similar product. Competition's not a problem. It's not a reason for you to stop. It's not a reason for you to say, hey, this is not a good idea. Someone else already thought of it. More of the opposite. You need to understand your competition. You need to realize that when people are out there competing with your similar ideas, that's a good thing. It means maybe technology's ready, maybe the market place is ready. So there's a lot of validation from that. But one reason people might say I'm not interested, is if you've identified some huge players out there with deep pockets, big research and development, lots of sales reps, distribution channels. And you know they're very interested in your space. They might eat your lunch too easily. So someone might walk away from that and see that it is too high of a risk. Obviously, the flip side, it could be a nice exit strategy, right? They might acquire you and, and bring you in, especially if you're thinking of a development company. But right now, we're focused on the problems and one problem is the competition's going to kill you. Long sales cycles. Technology commercialization, especially moving towards radical. But if you're in medical devices or health care services and products, it takes an awful long time to get through value analysis channels, to go through clinicals, to do things that convince people that they're going to buy your product. So, real common in, in a, in a medical device. I absolutely love your product. I'll buy it as soon as you come back and showing me that a whole bunch of other people have already bought it and you've completed all kinds of clinical studies and it's been around for a number of years, so I know it's safe and effective. Until then, I'm not going to buy it. So these real long sales cycles that take several years sometimes for a hospital to actually start buying your product you have to build, build those in. And so, many people on the other side of the magnifying glass don't have the tolerance for that kind of a long sales cycle. If you're going into a radical area, in a new, a new market or a new radical approach to something. Likewise, you're building the market. Now that's wonderful. Of course. We, we all know about that. Especially if you're going, going big or go home. You're going to invent your own market. Forget about a market. I'll make my own market. That's great. However, most times, throw away all the headlines. The few headlines that we see. Most times, you're going to go bankrupt trying to build a whole new marketplace. Because you haven't set up enough time and money to allow, to get the marketplace to change. No league to join into. No no little baseball league to join into. So what we're talking about here is the supply chain. Again, very different between radical breakthroughs and incremental. But if you think of your supply chain. How, most of the time, again, back to your innovation creed, you're not building a vertical company where you're going to do everything. You're going to need to start to figure out how to fit in with other people. Informally, or actual formal joint ventures, or formal agreements, where you're having someone to sell or distribute for you. And if you, for some reason, have a complicated sales channel, supply chain channel, getting raw materials all the way through the various steps to an end user. If that's complicated or the people don't want to play with you for one reason or another, then you're going to have to do everything yourself. And if you're going to do everything yourself, you could see some of these other problems start popping up. Right? Lot of competition, long sales cycle, mountain of money. So we'll take a break. But next, we're going to take those problems and convert them into questions that uncover those challenges.
