Today I had the pleasure to present on a panel with other entrepreneurs to a class of TI:GER students at Georgia Tech. I remember fondly sitting in their shoes and learning about startups in a classroom setting.
University research is all about building technology at the cutting edge – things that no one has ever done before and things that are non-obvious. Almost everyone I knew at Georgia Tech felt like their particular area of research was on the cusp of changing the world and had commercialization value.
One reason for this thinking is that researchers recognize there are few other people in the world capable of replicating what they do. They may be right or wrong about that; but in any case, they are counting on a technology barrier to entry to serve them well in a future commercialization process.
The biggest problem with this thinking is that in most cases the building up of a technological barrier to entry also results in a diminished market size. While a narrow and deep technology makes for great PhD dissertations, it is not good for commercial application.
Of course there are huge outliers to this. Emory, for instance, occasionally makes billions on a big drug.
One thing we had to do to commercialize our skillset was to right-size the technology to the market. It’s a tricky process.
My direct dissertation work for instance is not commercializable, and I would never consider trying to build a business around DW-MRI Tractography Segmentation.
High barriers to entry are great, as long as they don’t reduce the addressable market.
What are your thoughts on technology barriers to entry?
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