Managing Technology from Laboratory to Marketplace: Cheating the Valley of Death (Management for Professionals)

This book is about how to take great ideas from the laboratory to become successful, mainstream technologies that solve significant problems in the world. It is a story of survival and growth of vital technologies in a time of great change and uncertainty when society is transitioning from the known and relatively restricted world of information technology to the new and more challenging, and seemingly unbounded, age of energy transition, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence (AI). This story of the death and survival of ideas and technologies is also one that demands a shift in focus from the finished, downstream products that defined the computer age of the 1980s to those upstream materials, components, and processes that today feed the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. The forces that propel these technologies across the Valley of Death are fundamentally different than those that underlay the success of those earlier products and systems pivotal to the IT revolution of a few decades ago. Those actors who plan to invest time and money in future high-tech ventures need to understand this new landscape of technology creation, as do nations that wish to be competitive in the modern world. This book then delves into, uncovers, and follows the implications of these new laws of survival that apply to those foundational technologies that together drive competitive advantage and economic growth in the twenty-first century. Managing Technology from Laboratory to Marketplace outlines the process of getting innovative research out of the laboratory and into the market, a path which is often fraught with challenges. Many research projects meet their end as they attempt to cross this so-called “valley of death"--the period between the research phase of a project and the point when the new product or process emerging from that research becomes commercialized and enters the market. Firstly, this book aims to better understand how and why projects succeed in entering the market while others falter. Second, it uses these insights to guide researchers to optimize their chances of successfully making that transition, and finding their place in the market. The book primarily uses case studies from the field of advanced materials, but can be used by any researcher making the transition from laboratory to marketplace.