Commercialization of Innovative Technologies (Bringing Good Ideas to the Marketplace) || Developing Ideas

✍ Scribed by Touhill, C. Joseph; Touhill, Gregory J.; O'riordan, Thomas A.

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 618 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 047023007X
• DOI: 10.1002/9780470925362.ch8

✦ Synopsis

We have reached the point in the commercialization process where the innovation team decides that technology assessment has demonstrated that the idea is meritorious and can be commercialized successfully and profitably. So now the concept is ready for the development phase. Although the entrepreneur is active in the development phase, it's really the technologist who leads the way.

Concepts that are acquired by the innovation team come in various stages of maturity. Some are still budding nascent ideas, whereas others, especially those that have been kicking around for a while, are very near adulthood. Hence, the development phase can entail considerable effort or hardly any at all. Finding out where we are in the concept life cycle is an important task of the technology assessment. It is crucial in deciding how much money should be budgeted for development activities. The primary task of the development phase is to obtain sufficient information so that results of the development effort can be used to design and build a product ready for placement into customers' hands. Usually, this involves building and testing a prototype, or in the case of software, a beta test version. A good analogy is construction of a "concept car." The car is unique at first, but it serves as the model of all the copies that follow. The concept car is tested thoroughly and is modified many times before mass production begins.