Business development – The Online Gazette…

Tactical vs Strategic Licensing

Part II

In Part I of “Tactical vs Strategic Licensing” (October’s blogpost), we focused on the differences between tactical and strategic technology licensing, including the potential business usefulness of strategic licensing. Here we explore in greater detail the “right” business processes, resources, and organization for a successful transformation from tactical to strategic technology licensing.

From an operations perspective, the transformation from tactical to strategic licensing requires a supporting evolution in three distinct areas:

Business processes

Resources

Organization

To begin to understand where you are as a company along the “tactical” to “strategic” licensing continuum, consider fully the answers to the following questions:

Do we have the right processes in place?

For example, if you plan to license technologies which you are using yourself to support the products you sell, you’ll need to adopt a “business case” approach to assess the impact of licensing to third parties on your business that’s supported by self-manufacturing. A “best practice” followed by the most successful integrated manufacturing/licensing companies is the development of a formal, comprehensive business case approach, similar in depth and breadth to the company’s existing five-year business plans for its product lines.

Do we have licensable technologies?

Assuming that you decide to engage in technology licensing as a business per se, how are you going to generate licensable technologies on an ongoing basis? What is the interaction between the licensing group and the technology development groups? In most cases, operating units or business units continue to fund R&D, with the licensing group getting at least a voice in the early stages of the technology development process.

Does our licensing organization look like a P&L?

The transition from tactical to strategic often involves shifts in organization. Companies that have begun to treat licensing as an identifiable and separate business activity often put someone with successful P&L experience in charge. The group is then “built-out” with a full-time supporting cast dedicated to commercializing the licensable technologies. The performance of strategic licensing organizations is measured in terms of income generated.

A graphic depicting the “tactical” to “strategic” continuum is shown below. It provides a snapshot of the extent to which a licensing organization “looks” like a P&L.

Is licensing a viable business strategy element for you?

Technology licensing can be a useful vehicle for technology-rich companies. In Part III of “Tactical vs Strategic Licensing” (our next month’s blogpost), we’ll provide you with a checklist of key issues to address and which will lead you to the answer to this question!

For more on creating value by commercializing technology, see https://www.prakteka.com/category/technology-commercialization/

We at Prakteka LLC developed our expertise in market penetration strategies in the context of numerous and diverse client assignments, all focused on using technology to create business value. We are here to help you answer business-critical technology questions, too. For a customized plan for your needs, contact us at http://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

If Your Business Depends on Intellectual Property

If your business depends on intellectual property (IP), then “best practices” for your IP business activities are those that…

…support the business objectives of the company and

…increase company value.

For any high-performing business, there are 4 key building blocks: strategy, processes, resources and organization. Here are these building blocks applied to IP business practices:

Strategy: Which invention concepts are we free to develop? Which are worth patenting? Can we/should we consider an Engineering-to-Own-the-Space^SM innovation Strategy? ¹
Processes: Who decides how and where we should invest our development dollars?
Resources: Can we accelerate our development or broaden our reach by bringing in technologies from the outside? If so, which ones, from where, and for how much?
Organization: Do our IP development initiatives and outcomes have top management’s attention, understanding, and endorsement?

Adopting high performance IP business practices can enable you to:

…strengthen and even shift the basis of your competition

…protect IP that delivers high value to your customers and end-users

…avoid product and/or technology obsolescence

We at Prakteka LLC developed our IP expertise in the context of numerous and diverse client assignments, all focused on using intellectual property to create and sustain business value. We are here to help you, too, maximize the impact of your IP on business value. For a plan customized to your needs, contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

For more on the “Engineering-to-Own-the-Space” Innovation Strategy, follow this link to the SlideShare presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/mhastbacka/engineeringtoownthespace-innovation-strategy

Engineering-to-Own-the-Space is a service mark of Prakteka LLC.

Marketing Technology? What Your Prospects Want to Know

Seems as if everyone is marketing technology these days. Start-ups, mid-sized companies, inventors, individual entrepreneurs, major global corporations…all of them are promoting new technologies. But, when it comes to moving their prospective customers down the “awareness, consideration, preference, sale” funnel, many marketers are stalled even before they start!

Before you start preparing your marketing presentation, consider these 5 key facts your prospects want to know about your technology:

What are you selling? An idea? A product? A technology? A development or commercialization collaboration?
What does it do? Prospects don’t buy ideas or products or technologies or collaborations…they buy what these things DO! And they are most interested in what these things DO for THEM!
Do any other companies provide what you’re selling? If so, your prospects need to know how you are different and better, in ways that are meaningful to them.
How do you know what you’re selling works? And how do you know your offering is better than any competitor’s offering that might offer the same functionality? Said another way: who has validated your claims and how?
What is the value of your offering to your prospect? Reduced cost? Better performance? Easier to manufacture? Long life? Simple servicing? Understand what’s valuable to your prospect and direct your answer accordingly.

Use the above 5-point guide not only to prepare your marketing presentation but also to identify the prospects with genuine need for and interest in what you’re offering.

Want some customized help in preparing your marketing presentation? Contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

Or email us directly at mah@prakteka.com

For more about technology commercialization, go here https://www.prakteka.com/category/technology-commercialization/

Lessons Learned in Technology Assessment…Lesson 6…

This is the last of a series of six posts to share with you important lessons we’ve learned through our experiences working with numerous commercial clients in a variety of situations. On the path to your success in developing and commercializing technologies, they will help you avoid common pitfalls, unwarranted assumptions, and other sources of technical and commercial bias that could add up to business failures.

Lesson Six.

View Your Assessment as an Integrated Set of Findings to Establish Your Basis of Competition

Technical and market elements of a technology assessment should be considered together to determine the attractiveness and viability of candidate technologies within the realities of target addressable markets.

Lesson Six Case Study:

Client: Global Chemicals and Materials Company

Situation:

Develop and introduce new products based on its proprietary nonwovens materials technologies, already successful in apparel insulation applications

Technology Assessment Need: Develop and characterize the potential “product/market” roadmap that could be addressed by the client’s non-woven materials technologies

Our approach:

Identified acoustic (noise reduction) applications as promising high volume opportunity
Researched primary and secondary performance needs across an array of acoustic applications in commercial and industrial markets
Considering research findings holistically, identified and rank-ordered market opportunities which client could uniquely fill with its materials and technologies

Outcome: Acoustic applications with flame retardant functionality were identified as a segment in which our client could establish a basis of competition over other market participants. We segmented the market by level of flame and smoke performance requirements.

By understanding the market size of each applications and the associated flame/smoke performance requirements, our client could make sound judgments regarding the return on investment needed to develop application-specific non-woven products. In effect, the result was an array of short-, medium-, and long-range opportunities in acoustic applications.

For more on best practices in moving from lab-to-market, see https://www.prakteka.com/category/technology-assessment/

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Are you looking for new customers for your existing technologies and products?

Do you have excess manufacturing capacity you’d like to put to use?

Or are you launching a new product and need to understand which end-use applications are the most promising?

We’re ready and able to help you make your decisions with confidence. Contact us at https://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/

or via direct email at mah@prakteka.com

Lessons Learned in Technology Assessment…Lesson 3…

This is the third of a series of posts to share with you six important lessons we’ve learned through our experiences working with numerous commercial clients in a variety of situations. On the path to your success in developing and commercializing technologies, they will help you avoid common pitfalls, unwarranted assumptions, and other sources of technical and commercial bias that could add up to business failures.

This lesson: Think of your technology as a “functionality”

Technology needs to be useful – it needs to “function” in ways that are useful to prospective customers. Chances are your technology has multiple potential end use applications that you haven’t even thought of yet.

Lesson Three Case Study:

Client: Custom manufacturer and converter of polymers and fabrics with patented silicone-coated fabric technology. This proprietary technology enabled a useful finished product: surgical drapes that could withstand multiple sterilization cycles.

Situation:
• Manufacturing line for the novel surgical drape products was running at much less than capacity.
• Client wanted to fill the idle capacity without investing new capital.
• The obvious line extension would be other types of “reusables” sold to the medical products industry, but that industry was already saturated with a host of reusables as well as disposables, available at very low cost.

Technology Assessment Need: Do any other high-value end-use applications exist for products our client could make using its proprietary technology and its existing manufacturing capabilities?

Our approach:
• Identify the functions of the client’s product as viewed by its customers
• For each of the product’s useful functions, assess quantitatively its “value-in-use” to the customer
• Identify other addressable market segments/customers with similar functional requirements and value-in-use needs and for which our client’s product could be immediately useful and cost-competitive.

Outcome: Tapping relevant industry experts, we discovered that:
• It’s common practice in the nuclear power industry to contract out for services related to maintenance worker uniforms.
• In the textile rental segment of the nuclear services market, disposable fabrics are not used
• Maintenance worker uniforms with increased service life and/or greater feeling of comfort and durability have a competitive edge.

By viewing our client’s technology in terms of its functionality, we identified a potential new market segment and gave sharp focus to our client’s subsequent end-use applications development plans.

It’s not necessarily easy to find such out-of-the-box solutions. In this case, we brought together a range of end-use industry experts to bring fresh input to generating potential new applications for our client’s technology and product.

…Are you looking for new customers for your existing technologies and products?
…Do you have excess manufacturing capacity you’d like to put to use?
…Or are you launching a new product and need to understand which end-use applications are the most promising?

We’re ready and able to help you make your decisions with confidence. Contact us at http://www.prakteka.com/contact-us/
or via direct email at mah@prakteka.com