Getting started on your commercialisation journey

Every commercialisation story starts somewhere, and that somewhere is rarely a neat plan.

This week we look at the first steps academic entrepreneurs actually take: how they validate an idea, when they decide to commit, and what they wish they'd known before they began.

Tips from the field

Actionable advice drawn from academic entrepreneurs doing it for real

Narrow before you go to market.
The broader your focus, the harder it is to enter any market. Get your technology as specific as you can — clarity on what it does for whom is what makes early customers possible.

Let industry tell you what the product needs to be.
Don’t define your product from the lab outward. The standards, specifications, and use cases your future customers require are the best product development plan you’ll ever have.

Separate interest from willingness to pay.
People who say your idea is great are not the same as people who will pay for it. Find out early who has the budget and the authority — it changes your market entirely.

In their own words

Direct insights from academic entrepreneurs who’ve lived it

“Until we were really doing this work outside of the academic environment, I don’t think we really understood how rigorous the power industry is about what they will use and what they will not use and what qualification and proven attainment of standards they need a product to do before they will adopt it. They’re really, really rigorous about it — and that almost became our product development plan in those first couple of years.”
— Philip Orr, CEO & Founder, Synaptec

“By the end of the research projects, you’ve pretty much built your product and they’ve helped you to define what your product is going to be. And that’s really, really beneficial.”
— Brian Quinn, Founder & Former CEO, Wellfish Technology

“Is it a must have versus a nice to have? And really then just see if it’s desirable. So we’ve said it’s feasible in the proof of principle stage. We’ve shown that it’s desirable from the early accelerator customer discovery work. Then it’s actually seeing if it’s scalable and there is a business out there.”
— Aline Miller, Former CEO, Manchester BioGel

Making it real

One researcher’s journey from idea to impact

Ash Stott, CEO of Levidian, spent years chasing the wrong market. His green ammonia technology initially targeted fertiliser and shipping — the obvious big plays — but conversations with industry quickly revealed both were unreachable at their current scale. By going deep into those conversations rather than away from them, Ash found his real beachhead: small bench-top systems for industrial decarbonisation customers who could buy today. Validation didn’t just confirm the technology — it rebuilt the entire commercial strategy from the ground up.
Listen to the episode →

On our radar

Books, articles and reports worth your time this week

The Mom Test
Rob Fitzpatrick · 2013
The definitive guide to customer conversations that actually test your idea rather than just confirm it.
momtestbook.com

ICURe Programme — Innovate UK
Innovate UK · Updated annually
The UK’s primary market validation programme for researchers — worth understanding before you start building.
iccure.ac.uk

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup
Bill Aulet, MIT Press · 2013
A rigorous step-by-step framework for identifying and validating the right market before committing to it.
mitpress.mit.edu